ALL-WHEEL FELON
HUNTING 10S IN A 500KW GT-R
Obsession, noun: the state of being obsessed with something. An idea or thought that continually preoccupies or intrudes on a person’s mind. “he was in the grip of an obsession that he was powerless to resist” Synonyms: fixation, ruling, passion, mania, compulsion, preoccupation, infatuation, addiction, craze
With all the technological advances in the world and the rapid growth that has gripped the car industry for the past 50 years and dragged all us modifiers along for the ride, at our core, we’re still simple beings. Creatures of habit and desire, we’re good at forming big ideas, despite them not always being the best courses with the time or money we have available to blow, and we really are rubbish at resisting the urge to act on these particular thoughts, even when preoccupying ourselves with alternatives. So, when you’ve dreamed of one specific car since you were old enough to open your eyes, plastering your bedroom walls with posters of its likeness and spending almost every waking minute building it in your head to your exacting standards, over and over again, it’s nearly impossible to break free of the obsession. No matter how hard you try, you’re going to end up owning that car one way or another.
For Auckland-based Mohammed Nausheed, it was a chance encounter with a nondescript Nissan Skyline GT-R (R34) in his youth that planted the obsessive seed in his mind. With what seemed like constant reminders suddenly surrounding him from that moment on, he was powerless to resist the thought and dreamed of owning a R34 GT-R for himself throughout his teen years. But, once reaching the age when the financial means to own said car looked to be in sight, his hopes were crushed, as the prices spiked even higher than they’d ever been, locking him out of the market.
It presented an ultimatum that would see Mohammed opt to look back a couple of generations and invest in an R32 GT-R instead. “I was determined to buy a GT-R. The R34 had always been a dream car since I was a child, but, at the time, I couldn’t afford the $80K plus that it would have taken to own the R34,” he tells us. “The same day I had looked at an R34, I ended up going home and purchasing a BNR32; not my dream car, but a GT-R nonetheless.”
While it wasn’t what his heart had always been set on owning,
that R32 did offer a serious learning curve when it came to dealing with the infamous RB26DETT power plant. Not six months later, Mohammed discovered that it was down on power, so yanked the engine out to be pulled down. Turned out that both the head and block had a decent crack in them, and what was once very mild factory power was soon set to become an RB32 stroker with all the fruits. Fast forward three years, and the package was about to see final assembly, but Mohammed still could not shake that urge for an R34. All it would take to shake things up even further was one quick search of the local auction sites.
“I had lost all hope, really, but I was browsing Trade Me trying to find yet another part for the R32 and came across an R34 GT-R for sale at a local dealer,” he says. “I went to view it the next day, knowing that I still couldn’t afford it, especially with the RB32 build nearing completion, but I just had to. The bug bit me again, and this time I was obsessed. I was set on buying one. That car wasn’t the one for me, but I knew a friend who was having thoughts of selling his — this one now.”
A factory Getrag six-speed makes easy work of pumping the 506kW out to all fours, paired with a Nismo Super Coppermix twin-plate clutch to prevent the 774Nm from overpowering it Mohammed tells us that the response and power are more than enough; though, if he wanted even more on tap, it would only mean replacing the current GTX3582R and 1000cc injectors with bigger units