’ The R32 GT-R won every race in the Japanese Touring Car Championship in 1990, 1991, 1992 and 1993. Thanks to this unrelenting dominance and speed, the press granted it the name: Godzilla’
’ The R32 GT-R won every race in the Japanese Touring Car Championship in 1990, 1991, 1992 and 1993. Thanks to this unrelenting dominance and speed, the press granted it the name: Godzilla’
‘ If you want to make power, you want it to be fast, you use a single turbo. A single turbo, most of the time, is more responsive than a twin-turbo car now, too. The turbo technology is allowing it to spool faster while letting the engine breathe. So we’ re making 1000, 1200, 1500hp on something that’ s not a dog on the street anymore. You can’ t really apply that technology to the twins because of the packaging. There’ s just no room. You’ re stuck with the housing, the manifold is what it is.’
Before you start chasing four-figure power outputs, there’ s one element of the RB that seriously needs attention, says Anthony.‘ The biggest thing is oil control. The oiling system is no good. Oil pumps used to break in the early engines, in 1989 and 1990, they had what we call a short nose crank. The flats on the crank were about seven millimetres wide, which would drive the oil pump. But the oil pump was about 20 millimetres wide, so it was only engaging a third of the gear. That was causing the pumps to break. In the series two – 1992, 1993 [ onwards ]
– they superseded the crankshaft with what we call a long nose crank, which was a full engagement.
‘ That solved that problem. But then the material the gears were made of was just sintered steel, which is very brittle. They fall apart, especially with a lot of revs. That’ s why you get all these aftermarket oil pumps.
‘ The use of the engine and the horsepower – mainly RPM-wise, I should say more so than horsepower – is what determines what pump we’ ll put on an engine. A road car that we’ re going to spin to 8500rpm, it’ s going to make 800hp at the tyres. We’ ll put either a Tomei or a Nitto oil pump.
‘ If you’ re going to turn the engine past 9000rpm, we’ ll move to an external oil pump. A single-stage Barnes external oil pump, still a wet sump setup. We do an external pickup on an extended sump. Then we spin that pump at half engine speed. The issue with running engines beyond 9000rpm, we see cavitation, aeration, in the oil. We found
The GT-R doing what it was designed to do, tear up the race track
26 The Engine Rebuilder Issue 03