This is a controversial issue for GT-R owners in some regions. If you’ve been hanging around owners club forums and discussion boards you’ll have already seen the mysterious posts where owners get stuck with a car that wont start for seemingly unknown reasons.

Often the culprit is found, after much time and effort and probably swearing, to be the steering lock which seems to be in some way prone to a fault. The fault, when it arises, will prevent the car from starting and has so far been noted to affect Japanese and US model GT-Rs.

Nissan, in Japan at least, is cognizant of this issue and has begun sending out letters to GT-R owners informing them of a Service Campaign to replace potentially problematic steering locks for no charge for customers. We’ve received a copy of the letter and have included these photos of it.

We hope that following hot on the heels of this letter is a similar one for cars affected in other regions.

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Following on from our first part of this article on a walkthrough of Nismo Festival 2009, we continue our story.

By this stage of the day you would have either tired yourself out from shopping or done the alternative. That is to say, if you didn’t come to Nismo Festival to shop then maybe you’ve been lining up for some of the special event tickets available on the day. These include things like; Circuit Safari bus tours on the race track with SuperGT cars whizzing by and Passenger car ride-alongs on the track.

One of the cheaper and more available of the special tickets is the Grid Walk ticket in which you get to step foot on Fuji Speedway’s circuit to get up close with the cars and drivers. Take your posters, hats or postcards out with you and have them signed by Satoshi Motoyama and get a photo with a super popular race queen. All for just 1,500 yen and they sell a couple of hundred of them versus the 40 or so for other ticket types.

Once your sorted for tickets its time to check out the Japanese muscle on display down in the pit area. There’s so much racing history jammed into these garages from 2009 model SuperGT GT500 GT-Rs to KPGC10’s from the 70’s. These cars aren’t just static displays either. Chances are you’ll catch them warming up for one of the many circuit events where anything from the Group-A R32 GT-Rs to the latest GT500 R35s will be out on the circuit. This usually involves loud revving while up on their air jacks.

After you’ve gone through the pits thoroughly is probably about time to sit down and enjoy some motor sports. Some of the races from Nismo Festival 2009 were the All time Dream Battle featuring GT500 GT-Rs from various generations versus GT500 Fairlady Zs from 2007 and earlier.

We’ll featuring some of the circuit photos in the next update. For now sit back and have a click through some photos I took of the pits and special ticket events.

Images: Copyright (C) 2009 GTRBlog.com

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Given the opportunity, you would tune this too. Not content to have the quickest production GT-R available, this SpecV owner has booked it in for a few basic performance upgrades. Garage Saurus have complied and installed a few choice upgrades from their range such as the Trust / GReddy full titanium exhaust, Garage Saurus Suction Piping Kit, Blitz twin blow off valves, Garage Saurus upgraded wastegate actuators, and to control the boost a HKS EVC.

To complete the picture, ECU tuning will beging this week. With this being the first SpecV worked on, they expect a few speed bumps but nothing serious. While tuning a set of Garage Saurus Bosch 750cc injectors may make their way on to this car as well to beef up the fuel system. I think this car is in good hands! Should be interesting to see the final power figures.

Link: Garage Saurus R35 GT-R Website

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GT-RR has teamed up with Japanese carbon parts manufacturer Carbon Dry Japan to launch their extensive range of Nissan GT-R parts globally. Carbon Dry Japan is already known for producing parts for other tuners such as Esprit for whom they manufacture Esprit Dry Carbon GT Wing 262 and front grilles. Having just been launched in Japan, GT-RR has already setup a partnership with the company to distribute globally and so, available now, is the full range of parts from aero to interior including:

Aero Parts

• Dry Carbon Aero Hood
• Dry Carbon Rear Wing
• Dry Carbon Side Skirts
• Dry Carbon Front Canards
• Dry Carbon Rear Underspoiler w/optional F1 LED Tail light
• Dry Carbon Rear Overfenders
• Dry Carbon Front Lip Spoiler

Moving on to the interior we have:

• Dry Carbon Console Surround
• Dry Carbon Aircon Outlet Surrounds
• Dry Carbon Shifter Center Surround
• Dry Carbon Cup Holders

The quality of Carbon Dry parts has to be seen in person to fully appreciate. I checked out the Esprit parts recently and was impressed with what I saw. I think for the price you’d have pay for these items that’s something you might want to do before you make the jump.

For full photos of everything listed up there and pricing, hit up the link to the Carbon Dry Japan category over at GT-RR.

Link: Carbon Dry Japan parts on GT-RR.com

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It really seems like TAS2009 has just been but time flies and dates are now already announced for next years event. In case you don’t know or have never heard of it, Tokyo Auto Salon is Japan’s largest annual tuner auto show. Spread out over the many halls of the Makuhari Messe each year is everything you could possibly want Japanese car tuning related. From the subtle to the sublime from drift cars to VIP it’s all here and it’s growing in size.

This year you should most certainly plan your trip in advance and be in Tokyo from the 15th – 17th of January 2010.

Tokyo Auto Salon 2009 was huge, 388 companies exhibited 626 cars over 3,117 booths over god knows how many kilometers of hall aisles. This eclipses TAS2008 in size even without some of the bigger name tuners like HKS in attendance!

In January this year we attended Tokyo Auto Salon with guys from NAGTROC and were well impressed with the cars on show and of course, we’ll be back next year to bring you guys all the news we can from across the ocean.

If you’re planning on going, or even a maybe, post in the comments. We had many great meetups with NAGTROC members and GTRBlog readers this year in Tokyo so looking to do it all over and have an even better time in 2010.

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The Nissan Tochigi Plant is an amazing place to visit, sprawling over a vast physical area you need to take a bus (or a “plant test GT-R”) to make your way around it. That’s exactly what we did in January this year with NAGTROC thanks to Nissan Japan and our good friend and GTR Owners Club Japan President Shin Inoue. If you’re interested in the entire writeup on the experience you can checkout our previous post with the link to the official NAGTROC magazine style writeup. If you’re more of a visual person, well you can enjoy some of the photos I took at the plant.

In terms of what we could and could not photograph, we were quite restricted. Photography within the plant structures was forbidden due to certain confidential things we may or may not have seen. Outside again we were also fairly restricted. Only I was allowed to bring my trusty Nikon D300 and I tried to capture what I could but there was a LOT going on. Everyone else was made to leave their cameras behind.

Enjoy what we have here and let us know in the comments if you want any details on what exactly is going on in any of these. Click the giant “Read More” link below for the rest of the photos…

Photos: GTRBlog.com (C) 2009 – Reproduction with permission permitted
Link: NAGTROC and GTRBlog Visit to Nissan Tochigi Plant – Full Writeup (17mb, PDF)

Read more…

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In January of 2009, seven members of the North American GT-R Owners Club as well as two of us from GTRBlog took a trip to the ancestral home of the Nissan GT-R in Tochigi Japan – Nissan’s Tochigi Plant. To say the experience as anything less than a defining moment in my life would be to discount the scale of the event. It was intense and I’ve found new passion to continue doing what I do here at the ‘blog since.

I think many of the guys who were there from NAGTROC feel the same way and Davin (Tekknikal) does especially. He’s been writing and producing this article since and has now completed it for distribution.

The document is linked here in it’s original PDF format, it weighs in at 17mb since it includes some of the high-res photos but it’s certainly worth the download to experience the Tochigi Plant tour for yourself.

Link: Nissan Tochigi Plant Tour Writeup – NAGTROC Visit Tochigi Plant

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One of the most popular and fun parts of Nismo Festival is all the limited edition and interesting souvenirs you can pickup. And no … I don’t mean the race queens… Sheesh.

You gotta see the mad rush for this stuff at gate open time. I was a bit late showing up I admit, 8am Sunday morning exactly was when I arrived. Just as we got inside and were parking the car the gates opened and the mass of humanity flooded out of the gates. People had been waiting god knows how many hours to get a good place up front.

Once inside there’s a good reason for the rush, the line for the best items fills up quickly. Nismo Festival merchandise was popular but the most popular place was the Nismo Garage Sale Corner. Here they sell used and/or no longer serviceable parts off the past and even current SuperGT race cars. Everything from carbon hoods, carbon fenders, to entire carbon front ends.

Nismo only permit 8-10 people to browse the stuff at a time and if you’re in you feel free to take as long as you like checking out all the items. By the time I turned up I estimate the wait as long as 3 hours to get in to the stall. Being press has it’s advantages however so I was able to photograph all the items.

Read more…

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Everyone loves race queens, especially the Japanese. I shot a few of these girls before the public was allowed to get their mits on them. After the public was allowed on track it was physically impossible to access some of them due to the mobbing crowds 15 or so deep.

These girls are just as big to the fans as the race drivers are. It’s great what holding an umbrella can do for your career.

The rest of the photos are after the jump…

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One of the biggest highlights of the Nismo Festival for GT-R fans was the GT-R Special Lap battle. This was a 10 lap race between Nissan GT-R race cars from four generations racing together in one race. Quite an amazing site to see the combined history of JGTC/SuperGT racing together on the track going all out at the same time.

The entrants in the GT-R Special Battle were:

• R32 Group-A Race Cars: STP Taisan #2, Calsonic #12 and the #1 Unisa Jecs GT-Rs
• R33 GT-R GT500 JGTC Race Car: Pennzoil Nismo #23 GT500 GT-R
• R34 GT-R GT500 JGTC Race Cars: Pennzoil Nismo #23, Xanavi Nismo #22, Xanavi Nismo #23 and Motul Autech #22 GT500 GT-Rs
• R35 GT-R GT500 SuperGT Race Cars: #1 Xanavi Nismo, #22 Motul Autech, #3 YMS, #12 Calsonic, #24 Woodone Advan R35 GT500 GT-Rs

Before the race a ceremony was held to officially crown the championship GT-R with it’s prize, the right to wear the #1. The championship of the 2008 SuperGT series, the #23 Xanavi Nismo R35 GT-R was parked on the red carpet and drivers Satoshi Motoyama and Beno�t Tr�luyer were given a warm welcome by the crowd as well as Nissan CEO, Carlos Ghosn.

Mr Ghosn then gave a speech in Japanese to the Nismo Festival attendees and greeted all the other SuperGT drivers as well before departing. I was really surprised to see Carlos at Nismo Festival and think it’s a great thing he came.

The GT-R Special Battle race was then held after a short Z33 race event. The battle itself was great. The R35’s dominated in terms of speed as you’d expect but the Xanavi Nismo #23 R34 GT-R showed real commitment and kept up with them lap after lap falling behind only after half the race was over. Another surprise was that the R33 GT500 car was able to mix it with the R34’s easily keeping pace.

The Group-A R32’s had raw horsepower and the AWD advantage but when it comes to the corners, with no aero really to speak of they lacked the grip to make a difference and quickly fell back while the superior GT500 cars with their slick bodies and giant aero surfaces. The competition between the R32’s was fierce however and many times were braking too late for the 11th corner chicane going straight through it instead.

Overall I think it was amazing they got these cars out of their storage warehouse and got them back on the circuit where they belong for this. Kudos to Nismo for pulling off a very exciting race event here.

Click through the pages below to see the full photo gallery of the race including some of the pre-race ceremony and Carlos Ghosn’s visit…

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