Had a great day at Oulton Park last Wednesday with Scott, Bruce and Jamie. If you get the chance to drive at Oulton Park, take it, it's a great circuit, technical, generally pretty tight but one that deserves enormous respect. Unfortunately Gary and Dirk couldn't make it in the end despite a monumental effort to get Dirk's car ready.
Jamie lived up to form and more or less demolished a set of Tuscan Challenge (285) slicks on the day. The grip that they gave was truly enormous but they just couldn't cope with Mr Martin for a whole day!
The video and dvd will be out in the Autumn. Duke are also hoping to visit Japan (Nismo...) for some Japanese footage.
My main reason for posting was to thank Rod Bell for mapping my car. As some of you know, I was one of the first GT-R owners to fit the Power FC in the UK (30 months since) and whilst I have always been happy with it and the way it's performed, it has never been properly mapped to my car. Following a series of mods over the past year or so, I decided to ask Rod to map her properly and I have to say that the result surpassed all that I could have hoped for. I came away from Oulton Park the day after Rod had done the mapping thinking what a lucky ***stard I was and privileged to own such a sweet car which is now running like an absolute dream. She pulls like train from probably 1000 revs earlier than she did before and she is so smooth now.
We did 784 miles in 36 hours a lot of which was at full pelt on and off track but she never missed a beat. I'd also like to say that she never put a foot wrong but that was my little mistake..
I respect most other Skyline tuners in this country but I have to say that Rod was like a breath of fresh air to me. No airs or graces, nothing seemed like it was too much trouble and the obvious skill and expertise he has was only too obvious to me (and very reasonable!).
Just one word of warning though, he's a bloody liar, when he says to you, "follow me in my diesel Primera, I'm not much of a driver", DO NOT believe him! My car must be packing nigh on 500 bhp now and I guess he knows the roads around his place really well, but we had to really press on just to keep pace with him.
I'll be dynoing my car again soon to see what improvement the mapping made out of interest by she is really flying at the moment.
Both Jamie and I run HKS 2510s and whilst they may regarded as 'established' now compared with some of the newer turbos around, I have to say that I think they are superb. They may not be large enough for massive power but with the elbows installed, on track they spool up beautifully and I'd love to run against a car with a pair of these other turbos on board as I reckon they'd be hard pushed to be much quicker.... Bedford Autodrome on the 21st June anybody??
Fuel consumption is noticeably better but the mapping did retain the 'flame out' function on my car (see attached pic)!
Thanks Rod.
Peter.
PS. Good luck to Jamie and Bruce on Tuesday at Bedford Autodrome when they're both having a go at the howfast.com day.