And so everyone (myself included) thinks the Nissan GT-R is the best car in the world right now. EVO® magazine makes it as the ‘Car of the Year’, having beaten the 911, and trashed the R8 on the hills; AUTOCAR voted it as the ‘Best Driver’s Car’; WhatCar has it as the ‘Best Value-For-Money Performance Buy’; Car And Driver pitted it against the American Legend (the Corvette), in the American Game (a drag race), on American soil, and the GT-R won. (Sadly, C&D had to make you read between the lines to understand that the GT-R won, but only by the smallest or margins, for very obvious reasons.)
Not to be forgotten are the world-beating figures that the GT-R churns out that would oust any other performance car without having to participate in a group comparison. 0-60 in 3.8 seconds, tops out at 193mph. And who can ignore the price: £56,795 for the basic model, which is mind-boggling price for mind-boggling.
Now, the question is whether is this all this Nissan could do? And my answer is a downright NO. Notice that I left out the horsepower figures above? 473bhp? Its not a world-beating figure, if you ask me. Even the EVO XI now leaves the factory in FQ-400 forms, producing in excess of 400bhp (with a 2-litre motor!), and a lightly tuned one (like running on free-flow air filters and exhaust, and higher boost) can easily match 473, if not top it. However, in a power comparison, the Audi R8 needs 3.9secs to reach the century, and it takes a 5.2 litre V10 with 518 horsepower on the tap. That got me thinking, how on Earth did the Nissan do it?
I’ve got a theory to this. It’s not Nissan lying about the horsepower figures, nor are the marketing people playing down the hype the car has created. I would think that the problem lies in the engineering of the car itself, where it does not (and will never) reveal the actual power it produces, thanks to some clever trickery by the engineers. To all car nuts out there, I think its time you realize that no magazine reviews have successfully publish the GT-R’s wheel dynamometer figures. They will always say that the ‘dyno test is confusing the AWD traction system, and the slip differential is busy shuffling power between the 4 wheels, occasionally producing less than 200bhp’. It would also add that ‘if we run the engine dyno, yeah, its close to matching the manufacturer’s horsepower and torque figures’. For your information, the engine dyno is rubbish, if you ask me, because it’s the same method that the mileage guys use to calculate the highest fuel economy possible. The engine dyno measures the air-fuel ratio at a particular RPM, then uses a software to work out the fuel used over a particular range. The thing is that, this can be done while the car is stationary, which makes little sense, when the real mileage figures involve a lot of other stuff i.e. aerodynamics, wheel resistance, power loss (at places such as the gearbox and torque converters), and driving style. The same happens when measuring power, the engine is revved to a certain RPM, and A/F mixture is used to estimate the power produced, and just like measuring mileage, the power loss is not taken into account.
Thus, this is where wheel dyno comes in, where you place a car on frictionless rollers, and accelerate the car over a range of gears and speed and use softwares to work out the power at particular RPM and speed, in WHP figures, or Wheel Horsepower. It works best for either front- or rear-wheel drive cars (with traction control turned off, and without a limited-slip), where power is only distributed between the 2 wheels, and takes into account all the power losses, like gearbox and differentials. However, the Nissan is 4WD, and has one of the best 4WD power distributing system in the world, making it trip and stumble on the frictionless rollers, when the software is programmed to send most power to the wheel with the most grip, and it cant tell which wheel has the most of it. So if you place one on a dyno, it might think its snowing (given that the rollers have low friction), traction control and differentials intervene, and all you get is a GT-R producing 200bhp. And if you have to know, a Mazda 3 has more power than that.
All these makes measuring the GT-R’s power accurately impossible. I strongly believe that that beast is producing well in excess of 500bhp, and its Nissan’s intention to make the GT-R a played-down supercar slayer, capable doing it with minimum effort. They’d probably gave the lowest possible estimate to the horsepower figures.
Not to be forgotten are the world-beating figures that the GT-R churns out that would oust any other performance car without having to participate in a group comparison. 0-60 in 3.8 seconds, tops out at 193mph. And who can ignore the price: £56,795 for the basic model, which is mind-boggling price for mind-boggling.
Now, the question is whether is this all this Nissan could do? And my answer is a downright NO. Notice that I left out the horsepower figures above? 473bhp? Its not a world-beating figure, if you ask me. Even the EVO XI now leaves the factory in FQ-400 forms, producing in excess of 400bhp (with a 2-litre motor!), and a lightly tuned one (like running on free-flow air filters and exhaust, and higher boost) can easily match 473, if not top it. However, in a power comparison, the Audi R8 needs 3.9secs to reach the century, and it takes a 5.2 litre V10 with 518 horsepower on the tap. That got me thinking, how on Earth did the Nissan do it?
I’ve got a theory to this. It’s not Nissan lying about the horsepower figures, nor are the marketing people playing down the hype the car has created. I would think that the problem lies in the engineering of the car itself, where it does not (and will never) reveal the actual power it produces, thanks to some clever trickery by the engineers. To all car nuts out there, I think its time you realize that no magazine reviews have successfully publish the GT-R’s wheel dynamometer figures. They will always say that the ‘dyno test is confusing the AWD traction system, and the slip differential is busy shuffling power between the 4 wheels, occasionally producing less than 200bhp’. It would also add that ‘if we run the engine dyno, yeah, its close to matching the manufacturer’s horsepower and torque figures’. For your information, the engine dyno is rubbish, if you ask me, because it’s the same method that the mileage guys use to calculate the highest fuel economy possible. The engine dyno measures the air-fuel ratio at a particular RPM, then uses a software to work out the fuel used over a particular range. The thing is that, this can be done while the car is stationary, which makes little sense, when the real mileage figures involve a lot of other stuff i.e. aerodynamics, wheel resistance, power loss (at places such as the gearbox and torque converters), and driving style. The same happens when measuring power, the engine is revved to a certain RPM, and A/F mixture is used to estimate the power produced, and just like measuring mileage, the power loss is not taken into account.
Thus, this is where wheel dyno comes in, where you place a car on frictionless rollers, and accelerate the car over a range of gears and speed and use softwares to work out the power at particular RPM and speed, in WHP figures, or Wheel Horsepower. It works best for either front- or rear-wheel drive cars (with traction control turned off, and without a limited-slip), where power is only distributed between the 2 wheels, and takes into account all the power losses, like gearbox and differentials. However, the Nissan is 4WD, and has one of the best 4WD power distributing system in the world, making it trip and stumble on the frictionless rollers, when the software is programmed to send most power to the wheel with the most grip, and it cant tell which wheel has the most of it. So if you place one on a dyno, it might think its snowing (given that the rollers have low friction), traction control and differentials intervene, and all you get is a GT-R producing 200bhp. And if you have to know, a Mazda 3 has more power than that.
All these makes measuring the GT-R’s power accurately impossible. I strongly believe that that beast is producing well in excess of 500bhp, and its Nissan’s intention to make the GT-R a played-down supercar slayer, capable doing it with minimum effort. They’d probably gave the lowest possible estimate to the horsepower figures.
I’m a big fan of the GT-R, knowing that there’s much potential lies in the car, and I’m eager to see what can Nissan do more to the car, hopefully in the form of a V-Spec (like the great job Nissan has done to the R34 V-spec). What do you think?
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