Duncan's V37.......race car?

[Duncan]

So, for those following along at home, I've had the R32 up on stands for a while since a minor incident in the last rally, which required a new rear quarter panel to be welded in after the car had been (pretty much) put back square again.

The problem is of course, that some R32 GTR stuff is simply not available (eg front guards) and other things are either expensive (second hand) or very expensive (nismo heritage).  

In the end I've decided to try out a v37 with some track days, hill climbs etc before going ahead with modifying it for race/rally like the old GTR. To do so I've picked up an ADM Infiniti Q50 Red Sport, rather than a JDM car which offers much better value but might lead to complexities when I discuss spec with the production racing guys. In the meantime it will be my daily (well, more like weekly) driver, mostly highway use to Canberra or Sydney.

BTW yes, I did notice it is auto-only, and yes I did know the Z comes with the same motor in manual. Big issue with the Z for me is that it is unlikely I can meet the new rally cage clearance requirements in that chassis so I've gone the 4 door/auto route

The colour isn't great for rural lyf, and neither is having a sunroof for racing, but the Q50 market is small and it is what it is. Also...can't say I really like the shape much either, the front is OK but from the rear it is a dead ringer for a mazda 6

[Duncan]

So, first things first, it's had a service for all fluids (2x coolant as it has air/water heat exchangers instead of air/air), new air filters (they were terrible, and one was pinched when installed by NIssan's "technician").

Also, both the boot and bonnet gas struts were shot, so ebay sorted some new ones, the jack handle kept me alive for the first service

It needs tyres (more to come on that...) and the brakes are horribly grabby, looks like they've been badly glazed sitting around in Sydney traffic. On the bright side there are no obvious leaks and it runs well.

The car goes well with 300kw (stock, claimed, I'll put it on a dyno soon), does good skids and handles reasonably well eg in long medium g corners. It is no cruiser like the Fuga though and is noticeably jiggly on the average (poor) rural road and terrible on corrugated dirt.  I'll get some road/race shocks in it shortly which should help.

[niZmO_Man]

Awesome stuff. I should sell my R32 and get a V37 RedSport haha. Looking forward to this build.

[Duncan]

8 hours ago, niZmO_Man said:

Awesome stuff. I should sell my R32 and get a V37 RedSport haha. Looking forward to this build.

If you are selling an R32 GTR, you can buy 3 or 4 v37s Redsports.....

Anyway, a few more services/mods for daily use are the first order of business. I'm using the 2015 Q50 (LHD) workshop manuals from Nicoclub and they seem pretty much right, but a search didn't turn up any mention of the term "glove" so I could work out how to properly change the cabin filter for the AC. After some stuffing around, turns out Nissan now call it a "grove" box.

Anyway, for anyone who does want to change their cabin filter :

1. Half open the glove box then push upwards each side to release bottom hinges, then twist sideways to remove opening stoppers, then pop off dampener string LHS

2. Unclip the cover behind, then unclip the cover behind that

3. Cabin filter is now readily accessible, note the airflow arrow points downwards. It seems loose in the space but note the cover has tabs that will push it up when you install the cover

This time the filter was basically new so I've just marked it with the current date and reinstalled, and the aftermarket replacement I bought Wesfil (WACF-0177) is into the parts box

 

I really recommend checking this in any car that is new to you, they are normally really grotty

[Duncan]

OK, next order of business, very much not important but I didn't like how like how it looked (and, we can pretend it restricts airflow if that makes this better).

Both the front number plate, and more importantly the holder are pretty ugly.

Step1, replace bent old plate with new one in blue cf style with new values

Step2, unlike the Leaf where the bumper was flat enough to remove the holder altogether and just mount it on the bumper, with the v37 I decided to chop the hell out of the mount to retain the flat mounting surface.

Step 3, much better (needs black bolts I think)

[Duncan]

Onto trickier matters....this time of year a LED light bar makes a massive difference to avoid skippies etc, so that was the first main priority.

Unfortunately unlike both the Cima and the Fuga, there is no chance for a large central light bar inside the grille due to all of the redsport bits already there (intercooler radiator, extra water pump, sonar stuff).

So this time I've gone a pair of 8" light bars which does have the benefit that they can be angled outwards a little as well.

First, bumper needs to come off as there is no way to access the space behind the grill with it in place. Unlike the R32 which is (now) held on with 2 screws, the v37 had about 30 pin clips, 20 bolts and also 6 clips holding the damn thing on.

Basically you remove the intake (clips), the top side covers (nasty clips) to get at 2 bolts, the front of the undertray (about 15 bolts and 3 clips), the front side inner guard covers (3 bolts and a couple of clips each) to get at the bolts at the rear of the bump in the wheel well, and then 3 clips near the headlight (outside, then under headlight, then above headlight)

As part of that process the car got its first "race" mod so you can get at the top bumper bolts without removing the trim.

There are also about 8 different electrical connectors which are in grave danger of being cut and replaced by one multi pin deutsch connector one day. On the bright side it is clear the bumper had never been off by how tight the connectors were.

Once off, you can see there is very little space to work with. The lower section was not an option as the angle to the road would suck, plus the sonar module would push everything too far to the centre

So I mounted the left side bracket to just clear the water pump (a miss is as good as a mile, they say) and the horn has been moved backwards too. The brackets on these Narva lights were a nice height to clear the front reo, and I just drilled and rivnut-ed into the reo (angle drills suck, but at least it made the job possible)

With both mounted

Minor adjustments to horn locations but everything else cleared. Those horns may well get moved / one deleted depending on how the cooling is on hot days, they were moved well to the side in the R32

Next, onto the wiring which will be a pain...

[Duncan]

So....the good news is you don't have to remove the windscreen wipers to replace the 12v battery in a v37 (just).

You do however have to remove:

1. Battery area cover (un clips)

2. Battery area trim (pin clips)

3. Nav side windscreen cowling (more pin clips, plus the trim between the cowling and the front guard, and half of the cowling to bonnet seal

All of that gets you to here, with clear access to the battery

While there, it is worth clearing out the leaves and dirt that run from the cowling into that well, my car had a lot of crap there and it is a guaranteed future rust hotspot

[Duncan]

The point of all that for me was to get to the PDM (yes, v37 is as fancy as a haltech) which is between the battery and the front inner guard.  In there, pins 80 and 81 on connector E125 are for hi beam according to the USDM manuals. I chose to intercept the high beam signal there as it is next to the battery and firewall so it is a good place to mount the fuse/relay for the LEDs.

Unfortunately because you can't access the PDM with the battery in the car, it is difficult to test those wires are correct. The fuses for Left and Right high beam are marked on the PDM cover, so I checked continuity from the fuses to those pins with a multimeter, and it seems to be right.

From here I need to splice a wire into one of those 2, and run it into the cabin for a switch, then run the trigger wire back to that general location for the relay.

So, I removed the driver's side guard liner to check out where the wiring leaves the engine bay and enters the cabin. 

Turns out, that does not happen behind in guard liner at all....waste of time, nothing is routed through there, so that was another 5 pin clips, 4 screws and a bolt of wasted effort

All of the wiring is actually run across the separate compartment between the engine bay and the cabin under the cowling...so off with the windscreen wipers after all....

[PranK]

Digging this D. Nice one.

[r32-25t]

I dunno if I missed it but is this the turbo model?

[Duncan]

18 hours ago, r32-25t said:

I dunno if I missed it but is this the turbo model?

Yeah 3.0 twin turbo direct injected - VR30DDTT. Makes 298kw factory (or 400hp if you prefer). Compared to the 32 GTR which makes 250kw at the wheels in production car trim it should be in mid pack somewhere despite weighing 1700kg.

[Duncan]

So to the wiring for the LEDs, this should suit pretty much any modern car too.

I did some precision hacking of the dash in a flat area with space behind (and left a nice scratch too)

There I mounted a Narva 63169 On/Off/On switch with the following pinout

I wired 2 and 6 to ACC power that I tapped into near the fuse box, 7 to earth, 4 comes from the Hi beam power in the IPDM via the firewall and 5 returns through the firewall to a relay I mounted near the battery.

This means with the switch up the LEDs come on (as long as ACC is on), with it down they come on with high beams, and there is an off setting in the middle. The larger light on the switch comes on with it up, and the smaller light when they are set to come on with high beams (usual setting).

Getting through the firewall was a bit of a mission. I mentioned earlier that most of the wiring sits in a compartment behind the engine and outside the firewall. The main loom runs through there and into the cabin through a big grommet conveniently (not) located under the ABS module and master cylinder.

Thankfully there was also a small blanking plug there that I could just get to just above the main grommet but still very tricky, so I stuck a pick through to identify where it came out inside

Inside, it came through just above the throttle mounting (you can kind of see the shadow where it came through). There is space there for a couple more wires in future but not many.

Then, with the magic of straightened coathanger I ran twin core wire through. From there one wire was connected to the IPDM High beam wire and the other is the + trigger for the relay.

I used a 40a 5 pin normally open relay Narva 68032 (the LEDs are rated 30A) wired as follows:

85 (earth trigger) - to earth

86 (pos trigger) - to pin 5 of the switch

30 power in - to the battery + via a 40a maxi fuse

87 / 87 - one wire to each of the LED +

LED - is just earthed at the front reo

Took a lot of stuffing around trying to see how to work with a new car, but it ended up OK.

Lights in place

Lights on

 

[soviet_merlin]

Looking forward to see how you go with this! I have to admit race car is not the first thought coming to my mind when I see these cars. So this is definitely something different.

I'm wondering: can you defeat the collision warning systems and other safety features? I've heard they can cause issues when racing modern cars. Don't want the car to start emergency breaking because you are heading into a corner or towards obstacles too fast.

[PranK]

Looks great.

1700kg? She's a bigger girl than she looks! 

Duncan your linked images are huge. Some are around 9mb even as thumbnails. When linking to your own images the site can't resize them properly. Just FYI.

[Duncan]

hmm, thanks mate. I'm not sure how else to reduce them without loading them as attachments; the problem is some of the migrations in the past have resulted in lost pics in threads so I'd rather host them myself. Does the size cause a problem?

David the driver assist stuff is one reason for the ? in the thread title (along with durability of the auto box even with rebuilding).  In theory everything can be turned off but in practice it will be a hassle as you have to remember to turn traction control off and set either Sport+ or Personal mode every time you start the car. Even when we were racing the 350z back in the day you would have those frustrating moments where you'd leave the line and it would not let you turn the TCS off until it stops interrupting for a moment. Other option is to pull some fuses and see how much it complains.

There are a few modern cars in prod cars these days like M3, A45 etc. The BMWs are running OK but the A45 has been a non stop issue. And the auto Mustang that did the Bathurst 6 hours ran well but killed the trans 5 hours in.

[niZmO_Man]

Gotta resize those pics, 4,000px by 3,000px woo the detail

Looking awesome, I wish Infiniti did better and were still around. Remember folks, this is a luxury car so 1,700kg isn't heaps .

[PranK]

17 hours ago, Duncan said:

Does the size cause a problem?

Only for slow connections and some mobile users. The pics load eventually, was just an FYI.

[MBS206]

On 7/10/2024 at 11:18 AM, PranK said:

Only for slow connections and some mobile users. The pics load eventually, was just an FYI.

The pics refuse to load for me, even on a decent connection, Chrome was just shitting the bed.

Duncan to resize, open them in mspaint, hit CTRL + W enter 30% as the value, and then save as a new file and upload that. Especially if they're like a 3000x3000 pixel image! 😮

 

 

On the topic of Autos, in the Bathurst 6 hour, there was another auto, that's been there a few times. The Levitt Motorsports AMG C63.

He's killed autos before too for various reasons.

Also when the engine does things like thinking it's overheating, they'll often do weird things like turn off sport mode/manual mode and put it back to boring auto mode and turn power down etc.

Collision systems can do weird shit, especially things like TCS if you get a steering angle sensor out of alignment etc.

Rip the ECU out, put a carb on, save all your problems

[The Bogan]

Pics work fine for this old rooster on a Samsung phone

Car looks comfy Uncle Duncan 

[Duncan]

Pics resized, hopefully that works better.

Straightforward job today. The existing brakes were very grabby due to glazed pads and fronts 99% done (rears about 1/3 left I guess), so Racebrakes Sydney sent a care package

Front 5000 series 2 piece rotors with DBA extreme pads (I'm told these are 2024's bendix ultimates)

Rear 4000 series with the same pads

All on, no tricks except a few of the discs were pretty rusted to the hubs (the front had threads to push the disc off but rear did not). Also, it looks like the nav side rear handbrake had been over tightened, lots of dust, worn shoe and even a groove in the old drum....presumably it will go better now

Still need to replace the fluid with good stuff (motul 600) and bed them in, but I'm confident upgraded standard size will be all that it needs for now, they are pretty generous brakes from factory