Nissan Stagea Rs4 Engine And Automatic Gearbox Into Ceffy

[Lum]

Just seen someone here in the UK selling a Stagea RS-four with the RB25DET and an Automatic. This interests me as I was generally under the impression that the Nissan autobox was a bit weak, maximum of 250bhp, and would quickly be killed by an RB25 engine.

Is it a different gearbox in the Stagea or is the Stagea putting out less than 250bhp and thus uses the same gearbox? If it is a better box, how hard would it be to swap it into my AWD Ceffy (along with it's RB25, obviously) how much power is it likely to take?

I'm sure I'm going to get called a poofter for wanting to keep the car auto, but I need something my GF can drive (she has a long term injury to her right shoulder) and it's nice for the hours of stop/start traffic that take up far too much of my driving time over here.

[Lum]

Ok been doing some research. Info about Nissan autoboxes is somewhat thin on the ground, but if this site is correct it means that the Ceffy and the Stagea (and the S13 for that matter) use the same gearbox which in turn means I'd be good to go with an RB25 swap.

In the meantime, when my car arrives, I'm going to try this mod. It's designed for an SVX but Subaru and Nissan gearboxes are pretty much the same, basically what it does is instead of pulling out the dropping resistor to get harsher shifts (better for the gearbox, not so good for you) it provides a pressure sensitive switch that pulls the resistor only when the engine is under load (They set it to switch at "6 Hg" I'm guessing since it's American that they mean 6 inHg, so ~ 152 mmHg or 20 kPa) resulting in harsh shifts under acceleration (where you're most likely to do damage to your gearbox if you're making too much power) and normal shifts when you're just pottering about.

That plus a tranny cooler should make the gearbox able to stand up to around 330bhp if my research is correct (and it probably isn't, so I'd like some input here!). So basically it should take a mildly tuned RB25 (or a stock RB26 with the restrictor removed), or I could just go nuts with the RB20 since they're cheap to replace if I blow it! Aiming for around the 300bhp mark, nothing particularly special and still leaves a bit of a safety margin.