Photo Gallery: Targa Tasmania Kicks Off Tuesday – GT-R Gears Up!
Targa Tasmania 2008 kicks off this coming Tuesday, 15th of April and promises to be a mammoth one. For the first time the new Nissan R35 GT-R is competing in a tarmac rally against the worlds best supercars like the Porsche 911, Corvette Z06 and Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera.
Some of the GT-R’s biggest competition will come in serious packages like Jim Richard’s Porsche 911 GT2. Outright winner in eight of the past fifteen Targa Tamanias, Richard’s is certain to be number one in the Nissan’s crosshairs.
The GT-R is to be driven by Donut King Australia CEO Tony Alford with co-driver Karl Farmer. The team has had the car prepared by the guys at JustJap in Sydney and has recently had some serious hardware added in order to cope with the stresses of the six days and more than 2,000 kilometers of tarmac ahead of them.
The giant Brembo rotors are out. Replacing them are larger Mine’s 16 inch (400mm) slotted two piece rotors. Brake pads are upgraded to Hawk Performance items. Stock suspension has also been removed and upgraded with a full Mine’s ESTA Full Spec Suspension III kit providing more adjustability over the standard Bilstein Damptronic gear. The exhaust is flowing freely now with a titanium Silence-VX Pro Titan II setup again from Japanese tuning gurus Mine’s.
As this GT-R is a Japanese spec model the speed limiter issue had to be solved and the Mine’s VX ROM was just the ticket. A full roll cage and Sparco racing seats were also fitted.
The race isn’t just Porsche vs R35 though and plenty of other GT-R’s from all generations are racing. R34, R33 and R32 GT-R’s are represented as well as Mitsubishi Evos, Subaru WRX STis, Lotus Exige, even a Hyundai Tiburon.
Targa Tasmania is on from the 15th – 20th of April and GTRBlog will provide coverage of the GT-Rs performance so check back frequently for updates.
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I can’t wait to see how this thing fares, especially against the GT2! I’ve seen a Best Motoring video where they’ve put the R35 GT-R up against the 997 Porsche Turbo and GT3 and it just ate them alive on the Tsukuba circuit. It wasn’t far behind a Lambo Gallardo.
I also saw another Best Motoring video with the Amuse R35 GT-R and it was just out of this world. The only mods it had was a new ECU (which also raised boost to just over 1 bar), different suspension setup and a larger exhaust (there may have been other minor things; it was all in Japanese!) and it knocked 2 seconds off the Tsukuba lap time for a sub-1 min time, which is just crazily fast! The (stock) Gallardo was doing in the 1:02 range, as was the stock GT-R…
best of luck over there guys!
lets hope it makes it out in one piece & not in many pieces.
I just really hope that the driver is up to the task and does not make the gt-r’s first australian competitive outing one to forget, and so disappoint the whole gt-r community.
Such big things are expected of this car, and we all know that the car is up to it!