¶ Building the R32 Extreme GTR
If you've been following World Time Attack for a few years , then you're probably familiar with this build . We're here with Michelle and the R32 Extreme GTR to get a little bit more of an idea about what went into bringing this car to reality .
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So people think , with a build to this level , that you need to have all the technical skills to get the job done . But sometimes the more important skills to bring this car to reality are things like building a team with the technical skills and having the right people in place for the right job .
With the technical skills and having the right people in place for the right job . Can we just talk about the history of this car , maybe your background , how you became involved with the car , how you got it and where it all started ?
I used to race a Formula Holden , so I was open wheel racing before I got involved with this . But I always loved my R32s . They were to me , they're just my little love . So when I started this build , I don't have the technical skills to do all of this , I just had to make sure I had the right people to do it .
And you know you really that's probably the hardest thing with something like this , because I'm not high level , I'm not high technical . But I had a vision and a dream to build something very high quality . It grew even bigger than what I had anticipated because as it evolved it just opened up a can of worms of getting bigger and bigger as we went along .
But the biggest thing and the had to come into play was the quality control , and that was to manage the , the project and make sure that everybody was on the same page about the level of the build that it was going to be . And it didn't always work out that way .
There was , there was resistance , there was you know , it's a race car , it's not a show car . There there was a lot of comments like that that . You know , we just had to push past and and get it to the way we . If I was to rebuild this car again tomorrow , I think that people would understand the level of build that I was hoping to achieve .
But at the beginning that wasn't easy . So I really had to get the right people to come through to work through the different things and gets down to you know , your tuner and that type of thing . They've got to know the product that you've got in the car or you've got to change the product . They have to match .
You can't just have somebody go in and , you know , go with a Motec if that's not their background and vice versa . So I always say you know , you've either got to deal with the people .
If you've got a certain group of people that you want to be working on your car , you've got to be prepared to go with their expertise with that or you've got to change your people . If you're going to stick to a certain amount of components , you've got to get the right people for that componentry .
And that's the way I've tried to manage this build all the way through . I feel like I've got an amazing team now and I haven't looked backwards with that . And then I've got F&E Motorsports who are doing the pit crewing . They've been an amazing supportive team no resistance and everyone gets along well , so I think that's really critical .
I want to come back to some of the more kind of technical side of things and the specific people maybe doing each job and how you split that up . But just to bring it back a bit . So the vehicle originally was it a street car ? R32 ? Originally was it a street car r32 ? Uh , was it a race car ?
I believe it was a gray import . It was a bsm gtr , the blue and white . I think it was their second car when , when we got this one , they stripped it right back , redid the like it tricked all the chassis , rails and and everything else and , you know , cut off the front to open rules .
Then I took it to the best person that I could find for doing roll cages , had the discussion with them . Once again it wasn't my technical skills that came into how that cage went . I went through their advice and you know there's differing advices Do you go chrome moly ? Do you go steel ?
And if you go chrome moly and you have an accident , accident , have you got time to get it re-engineered again ? So so this car is actually heavier than I'd like it to be because I made the decision at that point to go steal , and they're the sorts of decisions you've got to make through and you just take the advice off the people you trust at the time .
So then you know your engine and you get that advice and with the engine we went billet . It was still fairly , fairly new , there wasn't too many people running it .
There was a lot of misunderstandings about how they should have been set up and so I had to find the right people to work around that and get an engine up to , especially the billet engines to get them to turn laps , not just go under 10 seconds , type of thing . I needed to be able to be out there for a long time .
So just getting the right people involved with that and the tuning , the Motec equipment and having somebody who really knows their stuff , it just made a huge difference to the car .
So was the intention from the start with the belt always to be a time attack car . Did you intend to drive it ? I see there's Tim Slade's name on the car . Now is he piloting the vehicle this year ?
he is at the moment ? Yes , he absolutely is . And when I first built it getting back to your earlier question when I first started the build no , we were also going to be driving it , my husband and I ourselves .
But that evolved and it got to a point where , after the fire and the comeback , I was actually going to drive myself , but I had to transition my mind from driving an open wheel and going back into a tin top . And then I guess some other things happened in the background as well . I got told it's too pretty to go fast and it'll never win .
And when you get those couple of comments , I became more obsessed with the car doing well than whether I have fun in it . Uh , so as it evolved , I realized then that the car was even beyond me so and I really wanted the car to do well . That's when I decided to put more experienced drivers in than me .
And we've had some beautiful , we've had some great drivers . I mean tim slade's amazing brad shields another amazing driver there and and I've been really lucky to have them I really have are you interested in expanding your automotive knowledge ?
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forward slash free yeah , I mean it's good to be able to understand that point . Take a step back and focus on the bigger picture as well . We'll just cover some of the basic architecture of the car . I know we have talked about it before , but this is still an R32 GTR underneath it all . You've got an RB26 in there .
It's still all-wheel drive , but a billet block . What type of gearbox is being used ? it's an albans st6 gearbox , uh sequential and uh , paddle shift and um , in terms of the rest of the cars , is a suspension . The pickup points things like that . Is it still based on a largely standard r32 chassis ?
pretty much . Yes , I've , we got , we've murray coot down , uh , to simmons plains and with brad and together they looked at and set everything up for the car . There's been a few changes since then , but it's sort of back to the same as that so we've kind of covered the past history of the car and the current state of it .
What were some of the changes for this year and what's the plan moving forward ?
I've got the . We've upgraded the turbo Precision 8080 in there at the moment and it made a great difference and Brad has been able to manage that through the MoTeC to get that so that it's not too laggy or anything like that . So we're not experiencing any lag .
We've got a new aero package on there , a lot of data on that , so that's looking promising and we haven't had the time to test like to have this many changes . But the new turbo , that extra power , things like that starting to put pressure on other areas that we had to pay attention to , which is what you do . That's what happens .
There's usually a knock-on effect . A little change here usually turns into something else . We tested . We had another wing since last time attack on there . We tried it and we wanted to go more . Now we've gone to the dual element , as you can see , with the swan mounts .
It's not a way that I thought I would go , because I've always been about how it looks and I wondered what I thought of that whole look . But I'm , it's growing on me , so it's , it's good and uh and the aero package and the people we're working through with that , with uh , das and Sydney Composites they're putting a lot of input into that .
So it goes back to what I was saying before about you've got to look at those special areas and make sure that the people that you've got for those areas really know what they're doing . And you get results if you just choose the right people .
And would you say you're kind of the middle person involved in it all , bringing all of that together ? Because when you have so many different teams working on it , naturally things can get lost in communication . So is that a skill you have to have bringing it all together ?
You do , and it's not an easy one . There's a lot to manage bringing it all together . You do and it's it's not . It's not an easy one . There's a lot to a lot to manage and keep it together .
But I'm fortunate to have the help of a couple of people working with me on that , even steve carr , who I call my team manager , but he laughs that off , but he's my bouncing board for a lot of this as well , and we just someone to talk to and , yeah , go through and make those final decisions .
It's really good I think that's a good insight into what goes into managing a build like this when you're not , uh , got hands-on doing everything yourself . So , moving forward , what's the kind of plan for the car over the next few years ?
look , if money wasn't an object , you I'd travel with the car overseas , but I just don't have that capacity at the moment . I think to myself well , one day that might happen , but I really don't know . It would be really lovely to see what I could do internationally .
But to take a whole team somewhere like that and it's not the type of car you can just hand over to another team , so I don't know how you know I could do that , but it's something that would be nice to be able to do .
Yeah , it's always good to have uh plans or goals to work towards and the success of the car over the last few years and this year . How's everything going ?
I'm trying not to be too hopeful because I know I know what can go wrong . I know that things can go wrong . The data suggests that there's going to , yeah , that there is a rapid improvement in the car . We just need to be able to put that down without breaking anything we haven't had the time to test that .
I'd like to see you know just how many more things we can break to get there . But if we can , you know if we can make everything out there , uh , line up and and no , you know , interrupted traffic or you know just , it doesn't take very much to to affect a time when you're at that
¶ High Performance Car Journey and Updates
top edge . But yeah , I'm trying not to be too hopeful , but we've not turned it up yet . So you know , here we are with all that power that we did on the dyno . We're yet to turn it up to that on the track in practice . So , to be fair , I'm as surprised as anyone else . What will come out of this ?
If I look at the data , it's amazing , the pre-emptive stuff , but we'll see .
We'll be following along anyway , and if anyone wants to follow along on the journey of the car and how it's going , where are they best to do that ?
Oh well , extreme GTR is on Facebook , it's on Instagram and TikTok . So , yeah , go on and have a look Awesome , well , thank you for your time , cheers .
Thank you very much too .
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