Exploring the journey of the R32 Extreme GTR, this episode features Michelle discussing the challenges and triumphs of building a record-smashing time attack car. From assembling a skilled team to navigating technical decisions, Michelle shares insights on quality control and the evolution of the build. With a focus on collaboration and expertise, she highlights the importance of having the right people for each aspect of the project. The conversation also touches on recent upgrades, driving strategies, and future aspirations for the car.
This RB power AWD R32 GTR Skyline reset the record in the GCG Open Class at the World Time Attack Challenge event under Tim Slade's capable jandals with a blistering 1:25.92. Recent upgrades to the car helped make this happen, including some aero changes courtesy of Sydney Composites and a bigger Precision Turbo & Engines 8080 Gen2 to make the most of it.
In a slightly different angle from the tech we generally dive into, this chat with owner Michele Guyer gives a little insight into some of the organisation and trust that goes into a long-term project like this GTR, which is now undoubtedly one of the world's fastest and best-presented time attack competitors.
As always, a lot of people and companies are involved behind the scenes, including FE Motorsports, Platinum Racing Products, Racetech Performance, Plazaman, Nitto Performance Engineering, Bosch Motorsport, Amaando Seals, Nulon, Xtreme Clutches, DAS and more. ------------------------------------ TIME STAMPS: 0:00 - Michele Guyer 0:15 - Building The Team 3:02 - The Origins: BSM GTR 4:10 - Billet Before It Was Cool 4:53 - Pro Vs Owner Driver 6:19 - Engine, Transmission Etc 7:08 - Recent Upgrades 9:36 - Future Plans? 10:10 - Spoiler: They Won Their Class 11:18 - Thanks Michele! 11:35 - Tim Slade Jandal Down! 12:20 - Braaaaaaaap! 13:00 - 1:25.92 13:13 - BUILD.TUNE.DRIVE
"...ild. We're here with Michelle and the R32 Extreme GTR to get a little bit more of an idea about what we..."
- Michele Guyer
- Building The Team
- The Origins: BSM GTR
- Billet Before It Was Cool
- Pro Vs Owner Driver
- Engine, Transmission Etc
- Recent Upgrades
- Future Plans?
- Spoiler: They Won Their Class
- Thanks Michele!
- Tim Slade Jandal Down!
- Braaaaaaaap!
- 1:25.92
- BUILD.TUNE.DRIVE
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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.
Welcome to High Performance Academy's tuned in Field Report podcast series.
In these special midweek episodes we look back through our archives to find the best conversations we've had through years worth of attending the best automotive events across the globe.
We've pulled the audio from these tech filled interviews with some of the industry's most well known figures and presented it in podcast format for you to enjoy as a quick hit of insider knowledge.
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 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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