Godzilla Remastered

"We've got a new assignment for you. You're moving to Australia. The R32 GT-R must win Bathurst!"

These were the words with which Alan Heaphy, lately the team manager for Nissan Motorsport Europe, was given his mission for the 1991 season. Living and working in the U.K., he'd been steering Howard Marsden's works Group C sportscar outfit to ever-greater success, including pole at Le Mans in 1990. But Nissan's failure at last year's Bathurst proved the stone that set off an avalanche: in Australia, only one race mattered, and Heaphy was seconded Down Under to turn things around.

Serious Re-Engineering
Since the Great Race had moved to its true home Mount Panorama in 1963, just four marques had ever won it, and two of those only once each: in 1966 the Mini Cooper S had run the bigger and heavier opposition into the ground, mostly by not needing to stop for fuel so often; and in 1985, the Jaguar XJ-S had given Tom Walkinshaw his first Mountain triumph, also by not needing to stop for fuel so often (ahem). But apart from these aberrations, every Bathurst whether Series Production, Big Banger Group C or Eurotrash Group A had been won by either a Ford or a Holden; not once had it been won by a Japanese car.

Nissan were determined to be the first, but it wasn't going to come easily. It was no secret that the Mountain was some of the most demanding tarmac in the world, but last year's shock win for Holden had driven home just what it would take. In the modern era, you needed a car that could be driven flat-out for the entire distance, standing up to all the stresses the Mountain could throw at it – the suspension loading up into Sulman Park, the hard braking at the bottom of the Chase, the hard acceleration again out of Hell Corner, the ever-rising engines temps as bugs and dust encrusted the radiator – all of it and more, for six-and-a-half hours straight.

The problem was, the GT-R as delivered wasn't capable of that.

You have to remember that our touring car category in Australia was very competitive and the thing is, a Japanese-spec racecar wouldn't win here. It wouldn't be quick enough against the the Ford Sierras and Holden Commodores.

So we had to homologate the parts that we wanted on the car with the FIA through CAMS to make the racecar a lot better, and that took a lot of work. We used a lot of Australian suppliers to help us get it right. – Fred Gibson, Auto Action #1787

Added Paul Beranger, manager of Nissan Motorsport Australia: "NISMO in Japan wasn't too impressed when we told them we needed to change their pride and joy."

That process had begun in 1990, but once Heaphy was ensconced as Gibson Motorsport's Lead Team Operations Manager, shortly after the Eastern Creek enduro, it kicked into overdrive.

When I arrived here I think at the end of November, I went straight to New Zealand where the team was racing at the Wellington street race and it was a good opportunity to see some of the problems the car had. The car was suffering badly with brake issues, not so much the handling, and there were other components that were just underdone.

They were running a number of Australian made components at that stage. They had their own front and rear uprights that were locally made, wishbones and a number of other components that were made in-house. They also had the Holinger gearbox that replaced the NISMO gearbox as they found it to be unreliable. – Alan Heaphy, Auto Action #1787

As the old saying goes, when there's hard work to be done some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don't turn up at all. Motor racing tends to weed out the latter two groups pretty quickly, but even by the absurd standards of the business, Fred Gibson had managed to assemble a group of true workaholics. Later Holden Racing Team chief Jeff Grech was one of them, and he remembered the GT-R vividly:

I loved working on them, but they were a mechanic-eater. We were the first to get to the track at six o'clock in the morning and we'd be the last to leave. You had to change both turbos, they were just a nightmare, very complex to service and maintain, but there was a lot of clever stuff. – Jeff Grech, AMC #107

But even for this crew, the off-season of 1990/'91 was remarkably intense. Before the flag fell for the first ATCC round in February, they not only had to sort out the issues in chassis GT-R 002, they also had to build a whole new car – chassis 003 – after Skaife had destroyed 001 in qualifying for the Adelaide Grand Prix support race. Building a new car while simultaneously carrying out a test and development programme ready for the new year was a Herculean task, but fortunately, as the pressure ramped up so did the support from Nissan.

The main problems with the Australian GT-Rs were the brakes, which tended to overheat with hard use; the cylinder blocks, which were cracking; and the turbos, which were failing as they tried to make the immense power required. For 1991 the rules on brakes had been relaxed, so that was the first problem the team tackled. The process was sped up by one of Heaphy's tricks from Europe: real-time telemetry, courtesy of some clever gizmos by PI Data Acquisition, a small company established by a group of Cambridge professors. The team had invested up to $400,000 into this promising new technology, and it paid off almost immediately.

During the Group C Prototype programme I had spent quite a bit of time with the PI data logging system. We had developed this system during the prototype programme and I brought one of those back with me. The engineer at the time was Ross Holder, he and the guys fitted the PI unit and sensors into chassis 002.

With the PI system in the car and the data we got from turbo speeds, brake temperatures and other items, we could basically say, "Change this, check that and do that". We spent almost every day bar Christmas Day modifying bits and pieces in the workshop to get the car up and running to go testing. Then we were out at Calder, I don't know how many days we spent out there, but testing brakes, testing oil coolers and that sort of thing.

The team were running cooling fans on the wheels which was to help with the brake cooling. I was concerned the fans weren't doing what they were supposed to do and believed that they were only covering up the open face of the wheel.

I remember when we fitted the infrared sensor near the disc, you could see the temperature go up and up and with the wheel fan on you could see it come down a little bit, but with the wheel fan off you could see it come down more rapidly. It showed that the brakes ran cooler with no fans and fans were never used again.

The development was just a vertical line, it really was. I mean over the period of late December/early January, the changes to the car and the data information that we got was invaluable. – Alan Heaphy, Auto Action #1787

Brake cooling was further boosted by some custom rims. Following HRT's lead, Gibson commissioned Kevin Drage of Castalloy in Adelaide to design and manufacture a new kind of 18x11 alloy wheel, lighter and stronger than anything currently on the market.

There were a number of different versions of the wheels because I think we were the first team to run a hollow spoke, a hollow centre as well. The early development wheels were an issue, with some cracking and keeping them tight, we used to have to torque them up to 800 foot-pound of torque to stop them coming undone. Kevin was constantly making changes to try and make them stronger and lighter. – Alan Heaphy, Auto Action #1787

One idea that popped up during development was a reversible flap located in the brake duct behind the front bumper. When racing on high-speed circuits where engine oil temps would soar, the duct could be bolted in one position to send air to the oil cooler; for tighter tracks that required heavier braking, the air could be ducted to the brakes instead.

The Group A engine was already running a nodular steel crank, beefier rods, titanium valves and retainers, plus Cosworth pistons, but a problem familiar to GT-R tuners was the straight-six layout itself. Under high power the engine could produce enough torque to twist the block until it cracked around the head bolt holes and into a particular water gallery. Up until Pukekohe, Gibson had been using a new block every race because of this. New engine mounts helped, but what was really needed was a redesign of the bracing inside the block itself, something that could only be implemented at the factory in Omori. Five upgraded blocks were made specifically for the team, virtually overnight, but it would be a couple of races before they arrived in Australia.

(Source)

While they were there, the Gibson embassage took the opporunity to talk to their turbo suppliers at Garrett. Quality control had been determined the main cause of their Garrett T25 turbochargers failing in 1990, so the team had invested in a balancing machine so they could assemble their own rather than have to buy complete units from Japan.

The team built their own turbochargers in-house. Myself and two other team guys went to Japan to talk to them about the cylinder block because at that stage we were splitting cylinder blocks which we believed were twisting when torque was applied.

We took one of our turbochargers with us and they had an engineering guy from Garrett at NISMO at the time we were there. He looked at that turbocharger, pulled it apart and reckoned our guys were two years in front of them with development work.

We had a 360 thrust bearing turbo and we had a balancing machine that used to suck the air out of everything and the guys could run and balance them up to about 120-130,000rpm. – Alan Heaphy, Auto Action #1787

Another bugbear was keeping oil in the sump, which required an intricate solution.

It was very complicated. It had a breather out the top of the engine that went into a separator tank and back into the sump. It even got the point where the final catch tank also had a pump that put the oil back into the sump. – Alan Heaphy, Auto Action #1787

Having experimented with triple-plate carbon clutches with the old HR31 in Europe, the idea had been transferred across to the R90CK Le Mans cars, before returning to touring cars now with the GT-R. A triple-plate carbon clutch fed the torque of the engine into the familiar Holinger 6-speed gearbox, which was retained because it worked very well. The HS6 became the flagship product for Holinger, adopted by many motorsport categories worldwide including the future V8 Supercars – where it would remain a staple until replaced by the current sequential unit in 2009. The team was soon exporting Holinger gearboxes to NISMO to hand out to Group A teams in Europe and Japan.

The Holinger box was about $18,000 back then and the NISMO box was $33,000. The GT-R produced so much torque that it could destroy the Nissan box with little effort!

The car didn't really need a 6-speed, it had plenty of torque you could have got away with less and it still would have won races. The same 6-speed was a good thing for other teams, particularly those with normally-aspirated engines. Teams like Perkins Engineering, HRT and many others used this gearbox. – Alan Heaphy, Auto Action #1787

Only a few Nissan parts remained in the Gibson GT-Rs, including the transfer case, front driveshafts, front diff and the rear diff, which initially was a Nissan LSD. It was reliable, but it it too would be replaced later in the year. 

The wheels, the suspension, the gearbox were all local. They [NISMO] made the cylinder blocks, but the Electromotive engine management system was done for us in America.

We had to do so much in-house ourselves – the engines and the whole thing. The only thing we didn't do was the Holinger gearbox. We got new things cast and I still have all the old drawings for that. All those things we got done to make it a better car were done because we had good people. Having the people that engineered the car, designed some of the equipment for the car, was very satisfying. The people made the difference.

We did it all ourselves, which was still very expensive, but not as expensive as getting all the bits from Japan. Our budget wasn't huge. We were very fortunate to have good sponsors as well as Nissan Australia. We were struggling when we first did GT-R because we didn't have enough money to do the job properly. We were lucky to have cigarette money come along [in 1992] because it was a very expensive car to run. – Fred Gibson, Auto Action #1787

 

Nemesis
So the new VN Commdore's big problem heading into 1991 was the Nissan; the Nissan's big problem, by contrast, was the economy. There were a number of factors pushing it downwards at the dawn of the 1990s: Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait creating yet another spike in oil prices; the U.S. treasury deciding the economy needed cooling after the cocaine bender of the 1980s, maintaining high interest rates to ward off inflation; and a downturn in the U.S. housing market caused by nothing more malicious than the Baby Boomers all having their houses now, and the Gen-X buyers that followed them happening to be much fewer in number. But the big factor for Australia was that the Japanese economic bubble of the late-1980s had finally started to burst, leading the country into what they still call "the Lost Decade". It would bring on things like the notorious Fuji banking scandal, which was profoundly shocking at the time but now reads like little more than a preview of basically all financial news post-Enron (F1 fans might remember the pretty blue Leyton House cars of this era; team moneybags Akira Akagi was jailed for his part in the Fuji Bank conspiracy). 

Globally, share prices dropped 25 percent; here in Australia, however, they fell 40 percent. At the time we were Japan's single largest supplier of coal, iron, wool, sugar and beef, so if the Japanese economy tanked ours wouldn't be far behind. And sure enough, by September 1990 the data showed Australia's GDP had dropped 1.8 percent, and on 29 November then-Treasurer Paul Keating delivered the line that would follow him into eternity: "This was the recession we had to have." 

There were business failures, bankruptcies, negative equity, falling investment and mounting unemployed. All the debt-financed business carpetbaggers like Russell Goward, Christopher Skase, Abe Goldberg etc were put out of commission. Australia was as Keating put it "de-spivved". Inflation was exorcised out of the Australian economy. It was a policy-induced recession though it was not meant to be; the econocrats were aiming for a soft landing but it all went terribly wrong.

The double-digit interest rates that were intended to give us that transition went awry, with the economy sent crashing. ...

Keating masterminded the recovery using a modest Keynesian stimulus but he was never to really see a full recovery. Unemployment remained stubbornly high at one point hitting 11.25 per cent of the workforce; they called it "the jobless recovery". – Alex Millmow, "Twenty-five years on from the recession we had to have", The Sydney Morning Herald

For context, my parents bought their first house around this time, and they remembered interest rates were up around 17 percent, compared to around 2 percent at the time of writing. Anyone with serious debt was basically wiped out, a couple of my dad's friends losing their farms, and one of them losing a lot more than that. If interest rates hadn't been so high, he told me darkly, he never would've had to go driving trucks to make ends meet, and so wouldn't have had the truck accident that killed him.

In short, it was the worst banking downturn in a century, and for once the old maxim that motor racing is last into a recession and last out again didn't hold true. For those who held sponsorship contracts with the big banks – like Allan Moffat, who was in bed with ANZ – the pain filtered through almost immediately.

One of my disappointments was in 1990, when I still had ANZ sponsorship. The managing director, Will Bailey, called me into his office to tell me that the bank had suffered its first loss in history and he'd had to dismiss some 3,000 people. Well, of course, they couldn't maintain the race team.

He told me the cars were mine and all the bills would be paid. Then he handed me an envelope with a cheque in it and you how much it was for? How about $250,000? That truly was, aw shit, the nicest thing that ever happened to me. He told me it was a donation to help me get my next sponsor.

From that day onward I spent most Christmas Day celebrations with Will Bailey and his wife. – Allan Moffat, AMC #79

So Gibson Motorsport had the misfortune to be launching the most expensive touring car Australia had ever seen, in the midst of Australia's worst recession from 1929 to 2020.

When people realised the GT-R was going to be the gun car, they knocked on our door and wanted to run GT-Rs – until we told them the budget. Two things killed that [customer cars] – one was the budget required and the second was that they would have to deal through Fred, because NISMO didn't want to deal with independent teams in Australia. They said they were happy to supply through Gibson Motorsport.

And motorsport being what it is, those people always believed they'd get second-rate service because Fred would be the works team and the rest would get hand-me-downs.

Fred was successful, of course, with the GIO car which ran under him, but the rest of the people – and I mean oil company sponsored teams – actually knocked on my door and asked us if they could be part of GT-R and ultimately they walked away from it because of the cost of doing it, even compared with the Sierra Cosworth RS500. – Paul Beranger, Auto Action #1787

So we would not see the ATCC become "Formula GT-R" like in Japan, where 18 NISMO-prepped Skylines duked it out for line honours at Fuji and Suzuka. Only one team in the country could afford that, and the only reason they could afford it was because, ironically, their corporate backers were deep in the red. The Button Car Plan was in full effect at this time but Nissan's cosy tie-up with Holden had meant for the last few years the most important car rolling down their Clayton production line was not the R31 Skyline, but the Pulsar hatchback, which was also being sold as the Holden Astra. When the shared engine contract was abruptly severed, Nissan had instead extended the hand of friendship to Broadmeadows, which resulted in the GQ Patrol becoming available as the Ford Maverick. But Ford's existing relationship with Mazda rather diluted their need for Nissan, and when Nissan presented a plan to build the next front-wheel drive Bluebird locally as both the Nissan Pintara and the Ford Corsair (replacing Ford's imported Telstar), Broadmeadows quietly brushed it off – the last thing they needed was another mid-size sedan creating volume issues for their Falcon. Nissan's days as an Australian manufacturer were rapidly spiralling to a close, so they had no choice but to promote like hell and hope for the best. The $1 million annual budget allocated to Gibson Motorsport was peanuts compared to what they stood to lose if they gave up that visibility.

Actual photo of Nissan Australia c.1991

Godzilla was finally ready to wade ashore and start its rampage, but it was hiding the fact that the company behind it was now sliding beneath the waves...