[ Epic Restoration ]
Fate presented Andy Middlehurst with the opportunity to restore the very Nissan Skyline GT-R he built and drove to victory in the Nineties. But could a hacked-about racer ever be as-original again?
Words SAM DAWSON Photography JONATHAN JACOB
Andy Middlehurst has, in effect, rebuilt this Nissan Skyline GT-R twice. ‘I was a works Nissan touring car driver along with Kieth O’Dor at Janspeed in the early Nineties,’ he recalls as he surveys his wellstocked trophy cabinet. ‘We contested the British Touring Car Championship in 1992 with the Primera, but suffered issues all year, which halted my progress in the series. In particular, with the drilled disc brakes, which would only be able to go through one heat cycle before warping.
‘So in response, Nissan offered me an entry into the National Saloon Car Championship instead. This was run to productionbased Group N rules, and O’Dor had run a Skyline in Production Saloons in both 1990 and 1991, before his transition to the British Touring Car Championship (BTCC).
‘Ahead of the 1994 season, I bought O’Dor’s old Janspeed Skyline from Rob Squires, as well as a new Skyline bodyshell from Dave Lampet at Spec Fab. I created two cars out of them, reshelling the best Janspeed parts into this one to race, together with Rob Bell in my workshop over winter 1993. I then sold off the other, second car, to raise funds.’
After two consecutive national-level championship wins in Saloon 2000 – as the NSCC was renamed – Middlehurst removed the Skyline’s air restrictors, so it could finally run at full power in GT-class racing. A one-off round of the British GT Championship at Oulton Park followed. In one final blaze of glory, and sharing the GT-Rwith other contemporary touring car drivers Armin Hahne, Matt Neal and Tim Harvey, Middlehurst entered the 1999 Nürburgring 24 Hours. ‘We didn’t finish. The car broke down early on in the race with rear suspension issues,’
Middlehurst confesses. ‘It was out of its depth at that level, and was past its best. It had been superseded.’
After the sadly ill-fated Nürburgring adventure, Middlehurst sold the car. It didn’t stop racing though. ‘Former World Speedway Champion Jan Pederson bought it,’ he recalls. ‘He’d retired from motorcycling with a broken back, but still fancied racing, had had a few outings in a Skyline before, and wanted to buy a championship-winning GT-R. He took it back to Denmark, and won some races there, before it ended up again in the UK at Abbey Grange Garage in London.
‘They turned it into a Time Attack car, fitting a different engine with a single turbocharger, cutting the boot floor out to lighten it, and spraying it with a replica Nissan works Calsonic livery. It was bought by a Mercedes Formula One team engine builder in Brackley, who did Time Attack and hillclimb events in it. During his ownership of it, he realised what it was, contacted me and told me he had the car. I told him I’d be interested in buying it if he ever wanted to sell it, and so he ended up part-exchanging it for a new Nissan GT-R from my dealership.’
Assessing the project
The Skyline made its home in the corner of Middlehurst’s dealership workshop while he made plans for it, working on it as a spare-time project alongside his motorsport endeavours, and selling Nissans. ‘I decided I wanted to rebuild it to 1996 specification – its most successful year with me,’ Middlehurst explains. ‘There was surprisingly little rust, and all the remaining body panels were original. However, the boot floor had been cut out as part of drastic weight reduction during the Time Attack years. The big single-turbo engine was the wrong one for the car, and rather amusingly I found it still had a scrape in the passenger-side rear three-quarter glass where one of my mechanics, Guy Finney, had put it on its side in a gravel trap during track-testing. With the exception of going through a few front bumpers tussling with fellow racer Michael Woodcock, I’d never crashed it, and as a soft roll, Finney’s accident didn’t do too much damage, so I decided to keep that window unrestored!
The first build; Andy takes on O’Dor’s old GT-R
Low point
‘Sourcing genuine NISMO parts. I had to track down original Nineties NISMO mechanics to find the correct door mirrors’
Andy Middlehurst
Bodywork and livery
‘I stripped the car’s bodyshell, down to bare metal,’ says Middlehurst. ‘Then I sandblasted, primed it with etch primer, and sprayed it in Nissan Flat White, with the exception of the rear wing, which I finished in Ferrari Rosso Corsa to blend into the intended Castrol livery.’ But there was still something missing.
‘The boot floor panel was the hardest part to find. You can’t go and buy spares or even patterns for them, especially not in Europe. I ended up contacting motorsport parts retailer IRS in Tokyo, which in turn contacted local Nissan dealers until they found an unused panel in someone’s stock room, which I had shipped over and welded in. Things have recently improved – Nissan has just started making heritage spares for Nineties Skylines, including body panels.
‘It was a similar story with the door mirrors,’ Middlehurst notes. ‘At some point, someone had replaced them with a standard set from a roadgoing Skyline, but this car originally had these aerodynamically-sculpted mirrors designed by NISMO.’ Also known as Nissan Motorsports International, this skunkworks combined the works competition department with an in-house aftermarket parts and tuning operation, including further aerodynamic development. ‘But once they completed the development of a particular car, like the R32 Skyline, they’d move on and their already-limited runs of parts would just be discontinued. As a result, I could not find a set of genuine NISMO mirrors for sale anywhere. We hadn’t had any spare sets in our old racing parts store, and I couldn’t even find them secondhand on the Japanese equivalents of eBay and Gumtree. ‘In the end, I had to go back through my old contacts book from the Nineties, to track down the NISMO mechanics that
I worked with and originally sourced parts through while racing the car, just to get a successful lead on a set of genuine NISMO lightweight aero racing mirrors. In the end, we managed to track some down. There were some sitting unused in a Japanese racing outlet’s store cupboard.’
Alterations to the fuel tank over the years had left more of the rear end butchered. ‘I needed to replace the fuel tank with a smaller-sized item anyway, but for the 1999 Nürburgring 24 Hours, it had been fitted with fast fuel fillers to aid the pit stops. The new filler necks had been fitted by drilling straight through the bodywork,’ said Middlehurst. ‘Just before the final paint stage, I welded a steel plate in behind the drilled holes, then ran filler over the outside, and skimmed it smooth.’
Paint finished, the racing decals needed to complete the livery were crucial, but getting them right resulted in something of a patchwork of input. ‘One of the reasons why the Castrol logos look perfect but also authentically slightly faded is because they’re old original stock items I still had lying around from when the car was new,’ says Middlehurst. ‘The rest of the decals I had remade by Boundary Garage, also in St. Helen’s, which produced them for me originally when they were new. Sadly they had no templates left over, so they used old photographs as a guide, remeasuring them and upsizing them from the original images. This was particularly important with the Micromuse logo, because the company didn’t exist any more. Perhaps it’s not surprising that I got a lot of my sponsorship from owners of technology firms I’d sold Skylines to. Micromuse joined my sponsors in 1996, following Oracle in 1995 – and it went on to be one of the principle sponsors of the Red Bull Formula One team.’
Stripped ’shell emerges from the paint shop
Andy explains why scuffed window remains
NISMO mirrors were hardest part to find
Decals involved old supplies and Ferrari paint
Interior and electrics
‘The dashboard was the original, but sadly needed replacing,’ said Middlehurst. ‘It had had a lot of holes drilled in it so different gauges could be fitted over the intervening years, so I had to pick through it taking them all out. The wiring loom had been left looking like a rat’s nest, which needed undoing to separate the original parts from the later additions.
‘Good R32 Skyline dashboards are near-impossible to come by, because they have a tendency to blister and crack in the sun. I managed to persuade Abbey MY FAVOUR Grange to give me one, as part of the deal that saw me get the original engine back. In return, it got its single-turbo Time Attack engine back.
‘With the wiring loom returned to standard, to re-accommodate the original engine’s twinturbocharged setup, I checked the ECU and found it had been fitted with performance chips. Back when the car was new, we used to remap it with EPROM (Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory) chips, to compensate for the air-restricted power cap by dialling in more torque. Unable to ascertain the provenance of the chips fitted, I replaced it with a new standard ECU, and found we still had one of our old EPROM chips – from Janspeed – in our stockroom. I fitted that, but also decided that when the engine was rebuilt, I’d leave out the air restrictors. So the precise specification the car would be rebuilt to was for the 1996 British GT Championship round at Oulton Park.
ECU needed rewiring for twin turbo setup
Engine deal led to rare fresh GT-R dashboard
Cage on tunnel houses gyroscopic yaw sensor
Original-style dials needed re-sourcing
High point
‘Finding the car again in the first place! It was almost as satisfying as getting it finished’
Andy Middlehurst
Engine
As the dashboard deal had proved, handily, Middlehurst knew where the Skyline’s original engine was hiding and was able to reunite them. However, it hadn’t been rebuilt since its last race, and had sat on a pallet for a long time.
‘The engine had come straight out of a racing car and was worn out through sheer hard use,’ said Middlehurst, recalling his stripdown discoveries. ‘I knew it definitely needed new bearings and shells – we used to rebuild the engine after every season, but Pederson hadn’t done this during several years of ownership, and it hadn’t undergone a rebuild before I sold it.
‘At a rough guess, it hadn’t received any proper attention for at least five years before it last ran. Sure enough, as I gradually took the engine apart, the big-end bearings were revealed to be knackered – while it would probably have run with them, but poorly, and it wouldn’t have lasted very long.’
‘As I rebuilt it, I added a new 1.2mm steel cylinder head gasket from HKS, and rebuilt the turbochargers with steel impeller blades. The original impeller blades were ceramic, and not up to the job, running the risk of disintegrating and ending up in the engine. The original thinking behind using ceramic impellers was that they retained their shape at relatively high temperatures and were less dense than metal, leading to lighter weight and less resistance, but in a motorsport application they don’t always stand up to punishment.’
But even installed and rewired, the engine was still minus a fuel tank. ‘The Nürburgring 24 Hours item was too big and heavy, but any original Nineties racing items left over from the 1996 specification would have been out of date even if we had them in stock,’ recalled Middlehurst’s son Chris. ‘So we took the dimensional information from the original tank design to Lee Leicester, a locally-based fabricator, who created a bespoke item for the car that met modern safety standards.’
Original engine had sat unused on a cargo pallet
Previous owner had removed twin turbos
As expected, big end bearings too worn to risk
MY FAVOURITE TOOL
Nissan Connect computer
‘I still have this from the Nineties, housed in a ruggedised laptop computer,’ says Andy Middlehurst of his trusty Connect software. ‘The Skyline was very advanced for its era, but unless you have the right software, you can’t interrogate its ECU. But with the original Connect system, if the car has a problem either related to, or connected to, the electronics – misfires and so on – you plug it in, consult Connect and you can find out what’s causing it. It saves a huge amount of time.’
Transmission
This is probably the most complicated part of a Skyline GT-R. ‘I knew the gearbox would need rebuilding anyway, because the synchromesh would be worn – they always do, you have to be careful with these gearboxes, learning a very deliberate shift action to avoid damaging them while racing, they’re the one real weak link of the R32 Skyline,’ Middlehurst recalls. ‘But then on top of all those issues, you have the electronicallyswitchable four-wheel-drive system, with a transfer box in the middle, controlled by the ECU, a G-sensor and a steering angle sensor. Accelerate off the start line, and it will only send 20 percent of the power to the front wheels. But more g-forces are sent forward and that increases to 50 percent. It will also send 50 percent forward through corners, read via the steering angle sensor.
‘I developed a special driving technique, going into corners on the brake in a straight line or at very narrow steering angles, releasing the brakes just before the bend, then accelerating hard and steering on the throttle to get better rear traction out of corners, with all four wheels pointing the same way. I disconnected the HICAS (High Capacity Actively Controlled Steering) four-wheel-steering system for racing as a result, because it prevents oversteer, and locked the rear wheels in place with shims.
‘And all of this needed rebuilding! The teeth had been knocked off the synchromesh rings – the likely result of overly fast gearshifts. When I rebuilt the differential, I pre-loaded the plates with 350lb ft of pressure, using two old driveshafts to clamp the flanges in place. It worked and the rear wheels turn almost together at all times now.
‘The yaw and g-sensor, so crucial to the operation of the four-wheel-drive system, is a little piece of glass, and it’s easily damaged. It sits on the transmission tunnel and acts like a gyroscope, with readings from it sent to the ECU telling it exactly what the car is doing. The one in the Skyline, amazingly, was still intact, but exposed. I fitted a cage over it from O’Dor’s Spa 24 Hours Skyline GT-R to protect it, which I’d originally sourced from Janspeed back in the Nineties.’
‘Godzilla’ nickname earned through GT-R’s racing dominance
Wheels and suspension
‘In keeping with its British GT Championship specification, I decided to keep the Enkei wheels that came with the car,’ explains Middlehurst. ‘The Skyline could run bigger wheels and brakes as a GT car, but by contrast, we had to run smaller OZ rims in National Saloons. The paint on the Enkeis was quite scruffy and they needed sandblasting and repainting, but the actual metal itself was in fine condition.’
The GT-R’s suspension was a trickier job though. ‘The original setup was bespoke, devised by Gordon Birtwistle – former Triumph chief engineer who set up the competition TR7s, now managing director of Proflex – but when the car came back to me, the suspension had been completely modified. And perhaps unsurprisingly, there were no Proflex spare parts available.
‘In the end, I had to take all the suspension off, give it all a very good clean, then put it back on the car drawing on my memory of Birtwistle’s design, tweaking things elike spring rates as I went along until it seemed more familiar. It was made easier by building it around a new rear subframe and originalspecification suspension arms – the one fitted to the car was very worn out, so thankfully I had some originals to draw upon.’
Suspension was recreated from memory!
Enkei wheels allowed for GT-spec brakes
Finished!
‘I just fitted the restoration in between other jobs,’ explains Middlehurst. Today, the business is much changed from the car’s original heyday, which of course, through a return to its appearance from those triumphant days in 1996, it references. ‘I’ve recently reconfigured the buildings, and the Skyline is now kept in what used to be the workshop where it was restored, but is now my garage. I’ve just moved the workshop’s location to what once used to be the showroom.
‘I’ve done a few laps of Silverstone in the car for old time’s sake, but then the Skyline Owners’ Club found out about it and wanted to get hold of it. So its first big show appearance was at the Autosport 2024 event at the NEC. It’s always in demand, so you’ll no doubt see more of it, but I’m not sure I’d ever want to risk it on track again. But never say never…’
Epic Restoration of the Year
This Nissan Skyline is one of 12 Epic Restorations you’ll be able to vote for in 2025, with the chance to win fabulous prizes of premium workshop gear from Machine Mart, including this versatile *Clarke Pro389 62-piece set with 16 screwdriver bits and 29 socket sizes. classiccarsmagazine.co.uk/EpicRestoOfTheYear.
*Prizes subject to change. They will be confirmed by the May 2025 issue
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