Nissan GT-R servicing and repair in Sharjah

This is where the money is on an R35 and it is also where the most guessing happens. The gearbox is not behind the engine — it is a dual-clutch transaxle at the rear of the car, and its oil is doing work inside the clutch packs rather than merely lubricating gears, which is why its condition and its specification matter far more than they would in a conventional automatic. The clutch packs have learned engagement points that the transmission controller stores, and those values can be read: a car whose learned points have moved towards the end of their range is telling you how much clutch is left, in a number, before anybody opens anything. So the order here is fixed and it is not negotiable. Read the adaptation and the stored faults first, assess the oil second, drive the car third, and only then discuss clutches. A large proportion of the cars brought to us as needing a gearbox need an oil service and a relearn, and the ones that genuinely need clutches will have said so in the figures.

On the earlier cars the housing that carries the clutch assembly at the front of the transaxle is a known item, particularly on cars that have been launched hard and repeatedly — which describes a meaningful share of them in this country. It is worth an owner knowing that this is not a sign of a neglected car and not a consequence of anything they did wrong; it is a known characteristic of the early build, and the later cars were changed. It matters because the symptom is easy to attribute elsewhere: a clunk from under the back of the car gets blamed on mounts, on the driveshafts or on the differential, and a workshop that has not met the car before will look at those first. So the housing is inspected directly with the car lifted, the join is looked at for the oil weep that usually precedes anything else, and the transaxle mounts are checked at the same time so the two are told apart rather than confused. Found early this is a repair with a known scope. Found late it takes the unit with it.

This engine does not have cast iron liners pressed into the block. The bores are a coating sprayed onto the aluminium, which is how the engine stays as compact and as light as it is and how it sheds heat as well as it does — and it is the single most important fact about repairing it. A conventional engine that has worn or scored a bore can be bored oversize and fitted with larger pistons. This one cannot be treated that way casually: the coating has a thickness, and machining through it is not a repair. So the assessment is done before any decision, not after the engine is apart — a leak-down test on every cylinder, the pattern of where the air is escaping, a borescope down the plug holes to look at the bore surface directly, and oil consumption established by measurement rather than by impression. An owner is then told what the realistic options actually are for this engine specifically, which is a very different list from the one a general engine shop would offer, and they are told it before anything is dismantled rather than after.

The drive layout on this car runs the wrong way round compared with almost anything else. The engine is at the front, the gearbox is at the back, and the front wheels are driven by a shaft that runs forward again from the transaxle through a transfer case with its own clutch and its own oil. That unit decides how much torque goes forward and when, which is most of why the car puts its power down the way it does. Two things follow. Its oil is a genuine service item with a specification of its own, and it is the one most often skipped because a workshop servicing the car has already done the engine and the transaxle and reasonably believes it is finished. And a shudder on full lock — the classic symptom here — is very often oil condition rather than hardware, which is a cheap answer to an alarming feeling. So we check the unit for stored faults, establish when its oil was last done and with what, and drive the car at low speed on full lock before anybody prices a clutch.

This engine needs a great deal of fuel at full load and it is supplied by two pumps working together in the tank, which is a robust arrangement and also one that can lose half its capacity without anything obvious happening. A car with one pump failing drives perfectly everywhere except at the top of the range at full throttle — the one place an owner goes occasionally and a workshop never goes at all — so it stores nothing useful and scans clean. The pattern is the diagnosis: a fault that only appears at full load, gets worse with a low tank, and has no presence in normal driving is a fuelling fault until proven otherwise. It is established on the road with fuel pressure and the fuel trims logged under load, not at idle, and it must be interpreted against the car’s actual state of tune, because a modified car asking for more fuel than standard will reach the limit of healthy standard pumps and present identically. Telling those two apart is the whole job, and it is worth doing before anything is bought.

An engine under boost has pressure in places a naturally aspirated one does not, and the path that vents the crankcase can end up carrying oil mist into the inlet rather than only vapour — more so on a car driven hard, and more so again on a car making more than standard power. The consequence is not dramatic and that is why it is worth naming: oil in the intake charge lowers the effective resistance to knock, so the engine detects knock and retards its timing to protect itself. The driver feels a car that has gone slightly soft, and the engine is doing exactly what it should. Left long enough it also collects in the intercooler and coats the intake tract. We look for it directly by opening the intake pipework and the intercooler outlet to see whether there is oil there, and we read knock correction on the road under load. Where there is oil we say so and explain what the options are, and where an owner has a modified car we are explicit that this is a consequence of the extra power rather than a failure of a part.