Skyline questions

[jasongtr]

really stuck on deciding what car to get, it only has to be really quick and fairly reliable.

Skylines as i understand are really tuneable - i.e easily to 400bhp,

how reliable are they and how thirsty are they, could i use it daily without needing a mid flight fuel tanker

also for up to 15k what is the best i can get? R33 gtr?

cheers

[Stu R]

Very reliable if they've been looked after. Oil starvation is a known problem with them, too long spent at the top of the rev range and the head gets all the oil, at the cost of bottom end bearings usually (on GTR's), long right handers at speed can also cause oil starvation as the pickup isn't submerged sometimes in these situations.

Not neccessarily a problem, if you look after and respect the car, it'll vastly reduce the chances of it happening, and it's not happened to too many folks, but certainly a few including me.
A baffled sump and an orifice in the oil feed to the head will minimise any risk of this happening. RIPS racing in NZ make some cracking extended and baffled sumps (bespoke hand made items), as do tomei and the like (cast).

Other than that I had no problems with my 33 GTR in 2 years, and yep it got used daily until recently.

MPG wise they're not exactly superb, expect at best 25mpg but more realistically 17-20. On average I got around 17 combined, it wasn't standard though.

400bhp in a GTR is an absolute piece of cake. Decent stage 1 mods (full exhaust with downpipes, decat, mild boost increase [0.7 bar as standard, restrictor in place which can be removed to get 1 bar, but a decent boost controller is recommended], and a few other tweaks) will see an easy 400bhp.

It needn't be an exercise in cost owning one, many of the "specialist" tuners charge way OTT for no real reason other than they have a large customer base. That's not to say they don't do good work, but there are others that do as good if not better work for less. Parts wise it's often cheaper to source them from abroad, with places like RHD Japan and nengun proving popular.

As for what you can get for you money, you should be able to get a very clean R33 GTR with sensible milage for that price, with some change. It's a buyers market. An R34 GTT (rear wheel drive, 2.5 single turbo) could also be had with some considerable change left. Lovely cars, but an entirely different driving experience to a GTR, some prefer them, I don't but they're still fun.

Personally I'd get over to the owners club, massive resources there of useful information, buyers guides and so on to be found on the forum. www.gtr.co.uk
There should be pleanty of nice examples over here already up for grabs, but if you struggle finding one newera imports are well worth a look, or the chap who imported mine ddavejj on the GTR forums (extreme imports in bargoed, wales).

Hope this helps.
Stu

Edited by Stu R on Saturday 15th March 23:24

[jasongtr]

thanks stu thats was very informative, can i ask why did you get rid of yours?

[liner33]

I have a 400hp R33 GTST and can pretty much echo what Stu said although the RB25 engine doesnt seem to share the oil issues of its RB26 brother

I tend to get around 18-20mpg out of mine

My car is highly modified and very low so i dont use it as a daily driver but i can if need be

If i was looking for a daily driver i would look for a 34 GTT

[Stu R]

jasongtr said:

thanks stu thats was very informative, can i ask why did you get rid of yours?

a few reasons really, nothing to do with the car however. Basically it wasn't getting used and I started a new job which meant I'd be doing a hell of a lot of miles weekly. It certainly wasn't a garage queen despite the fancy respray, but anywhere from 500-1k miles a week would have soon taken it's toll on the paintwork.

main reasons were I fancied a change, I'd had it for 2 years and was at the stage where it'd be megabucks to get more power, or sell it and look for something different. I've still not decided what I want yet, and the R35 GTR is a fair way away so I'm spending some time with a Ducati and getting back into bikes, and looking for a suitable replacement for the GTR for when the summer comes.