Since its launch over 18 months ago, Nissan's venerable flagship vehicle - now synonymous with these three famous letters:
"GT-R" - has pretty much done the impossible. It has taken on and embarrassed the world's most established supercar brands and proved that the Japanese mean business. But their quest for domination is far from over. On top of the recently factory tuned Spec-V, the GT-R has well and truly entered the aftermarket tuning scene where the possibilities, as they say, are endless. With most shops concentrating on fine-tuning the all-new, all-aluminum, twin-turbo VR38, there is one company that has grabbed our attention for their, well, different approach to things. In their search for additional performance they have created the world's only quad-charged Nissan GT-R. Four times the boost? Yes, please.
Located in the town of Fujinomiya, right at the base of Mount Fuji, Power Enterprise has become a well-established name in the Japanese tuning scene, with a reputation for creating some pretty mean rides over the years. Tominaga-san, the president, has a wealth of knowledge when it comes to building engines, due to his experience in rallying earlier on in his career. As every forward-thinking engineer, Tominaga-san is always thinking up new ways to improve the performance of cars, and over the last few years has relied greatly on supercharging. One of the first few cars we are shown in the workshop is his personal daily driver: a new-generation Toyota Land Cruiser sporting a supercharged V8, which cranks out almost 500hp! The Power Enterprise supercharger treatment has even made it down to the microscopic Toyota iQ city car (the soon-to-be Scion iQ), which helps its asthmatic 1.0L motor develop into puberty. But today it's the GT-R we are here for, winner of the "Best Modified Car" award at this year's Tokyo Auto Salon.
As development manager Ono-san explains, "After creating two basic tuning packages for the GT-R, we wanted to create something a little more special." With so much supercharging experience it was quickly decided that a pair of small blowers would be the best solution to boost power, and at the same time would also increase the lower-rpm torque curve. So how did they do it? First up a pair of Rotrex C30-94 superchargers were selected for their compact dimensions, and fitted at each corner of the engine where the stock air boxes used to be located. The layout is fairly simple; basically the charge that has been compressed by the stock IHI turbochargers is passed on to the Rotrex units, which further compress it up to 1.5 bar before sending it to the intercoolers. The best way to think of it is as a kind of helper-system to the factory forced induction, which is already capable of making great power on it's own - so as you can imagine, twice the boosting capabilities does a lot to the VR38's power curve. Ono-san fabricated all the custom aluminum piping that connects the blowers, something that wasn't so easy due to the lack of space. New intake pipes were made and mated to the Air Impulse II air filters, which have been located close to the center grille for better flow. The polished custom intercooler piping does away with any type of blow-off valve, something not required in a set-up of this nature.