So you have probably been following the progress of our R35 GT-R build over the past few articles. We had installed a full complement of bolt-on power parts from Greddy, Cobb Tuning, and Ignition Projects with supporting peripherals from CSF Cooling and Radium Engineering. Will all the players in place, it was now time to tune our car to see what it could do. The GT-R is an interesting car, with stock turbos and the right bolt ons the VR38 engine can easily make enough power to blow itself to smithereens. That power level is considered to be 65o lb-feet of torque and not too much more hp than that. Since we were enlarging our MAF sample tubes and going to flex-fuel, more complexity was also being added to the tuning. With all of this going on and us wanting to take our engine to its limit but not exceeding it, we had to depend on good tuning. When we require the best in OEM ECU tuning we go to the guys at M-Engineering. M-Engineering has a lot of GT-R experience being some of the first people to do extensive tuning on the platform.
Read more about our GT-R Project Here!
For a dyno, we used the Windtunnel dyno at World Motorsports. This is our favorite dyno and probably the best chassis dyno west of the Mississippi. The World Motorsports dyno fan is this 1000 hp monster needed to produce the over 120 mph winds that the dyno cell is capable of. This fan costs more than the dyno itself and the building had to be rewired to accommodate its power demands! The other grills cover the dyno room’s air exchange fans. These fans alone are about as powerful as the typical main fans of most dynos! They completely exchange the air in the dyno room every six seconds. In this case, the dyno fans are more powerful than the car!
We had a hell of a time finding the tow hook for strapping the car down. So if you didn’t know it’s under the passenger side floor mat in a GT-R.
Ok, we are all strapped down and ready to close the doors and start tuning!
M-Engineerings, Jason Carberry goes to work doing the initial rough tuning so the car could be started. This would include scaling for the Cobb/Injector Dynamics 1300cc injectors, adjusting the MAF compensation tables so our larger sampling tubes could read better, enabling the Cobb Tuning CAN hub, and setting some of the initial flex-fuel and fuel pressure failsafe parameters that the CAN hub allows.
