This Sunday was the second annual Superlap Time Attack event at Oran Park Raceway outside Sydney Australia. Some seriously modified cars were in attendance with some pretty serious drivers behind the wheels.

It was a GT-R fest all round with many examples in attendance from R32 Skyline GT-Rs all the way up to the R35 GT-R from RGM Racing driven by Russ Newman.

On the topic of the RGM Racing R35, they’re running a little different to the setup from Superlap 2008. The car was prepped for tarmac rally events and indeed it will be entering into Targa Tasmania but really, such modifications barely change it from standard specification. Including a roll cage, timing gear, fire extinguisher, racing seats and harnesses the car cannot stray far from standard weight due to the class rules. What did change were the wheels and tires.

This year they ran the 19″ Volk TE37 wheels wrapped in Toyo Proxes R888 tires. The choice of going with 19″ wheels was made due to difficulty of fitting 400mm rotors (a common upgrade on the R35) under 18″ wheels while giving options for R-Compound tires that a 20″ wheel currently doesn’t.

Unfortunately the combination didn’t work to the GT-Rs advantage and seemed to work against the cars weight and cornering forces resulting in an abundance of oversteer and lack of grip on corner exit. Understeer was reduced but you can see in the photo gallery that the soft sidewalls were pushed to their limit. Russel reported the entire feel of the setup to be slippery compared to the standard OEM delivered Dunlop 20″ DSST 600 street tires.

Wanting to save his OEM rubber for Targa Tamania coming up in late April, Russ was content to run lower times and have a great day doing it managing a 1:18.769 a full 1.6 seconds slower than last years best time on 1:17.1 with a standard car on Dunlop tires.

Another exciting event this weekend was the debut of the Advan/Hi Octane Racing Time Attack R34 GT-R. A serious weapon that will likely represent Australia at an international level of time attack motor racing. This full ground up prepared R34 GT-R has just about every dream component that the best of Japan and Australia’s RB and GT-R engineering minds can come up with. Even in it’s incomplete state, the car ran second fastest on the day running deep into the 1:13s suffering with some serious grip issues. We’ll be making a separate article on this one in the next week or so.

Thanks to the organisers of Superlap for the great event, Yokohama and the other Superlap sponsors and RGM Racing for the access and information on the R35 GT-R.

We have a truck load of GT-R photos from the day so hit up the Read More link and check them out…

Link: Superlap Official Website
Link: Superlap related articles on GTRBlog.com

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