Portland, Oregon—the City of Roses—is home to about two million long-haired Americans who wear Tiva sandals and hiking shorts year-round, only eat organic greens and drink microbrewed beers, and listen to underground punk rock while wondering how they can reduce their carbon footprint (hemp sandals, maybe?). Or so the stereotype goes, but truth be told there are more dynos per capita in the Northwest than any other part of the country, along with an equally large tuner community to support them.
And among the top tuner shops in the Northwest is Portland Speed Industries, a full-service facility with a state-of-the-art, 13,000–square-foot shop that includes a properly ventilated and sound-deadened dyno room where they tweak fuel and ignition maps on its brand-new AWD eddy-current Dynojet. But just in case you need some evidence of the company’s 15 years of tuning experience, co-owners Jason Oefelein and Erick Sackhoff and their staff at PSI have assembled this jaw-dropping R34 Nissan Skyline GT-R as a showcase of their detail-oriented and comprehensive tuning philosophy.
Like most shops, PSI felt it needed a demo car to promote its particular brand and style of tuning. Oftentimes the temptation is to build a race car and try to prove the shop’s credentials at the dragstrip or around a racetrack, but PSI isn’t like most shops. Jason and the crew at PSI gave their shop-car needs a lot of thought, and in the end they decided a show car/street car approach would be a better fit for their total tuning approach that includes paying close attention to cosmetic and aesthetic elements as well as power delivery and driveability. According to Jason, “We wanted something that was really fast but wasn’t going to eat up all the shop’s time to build and maintain [the way a race car would]. We really wanted to balance out the time and money invested in a shop car, so building something for the street just made the most sense.”
As fate would have it, Jason had been working on the performance end of a R34 GT-R project car build while working at a different shop. The GT-R’s owner, Joe Galante, an experienced SEMA car builder, had already made a bunch of high-quality exterior upgrades to it, including the Top Secret front bumper, splitter and rear diffusers featured on the car to this day, as well as the C-West side skirts, Craft Square sideview mirrors, Nismo clear corners and a fresh coat of PPG Gunmetal Gray paint. But Joe had a lot of other projects going on and decided to put his R34 up for sale in the DuPont Registry, where Jason happened to spot it. He immediately gave Joe a call, since the newly opened PSI would be able to make great use of it as a demo car, resulting in a quick sale being arranged. According to Jason, “Buying the R34 was really a no-brainer, since we already knew all the ins and outs of the car and Joe really wanted us to grab the torch and run with it while maintaining some input into the build process.”
That’s when the crew at PSI really sank their teeth into their newly acquired Skyline, with every employee pouring his blood, sweat and tears into a very quick and intense build process that lasted just two and a half weeks. Wanting to build something extreme but streetable—not some 1,000hp trailer queen that’s virtually undriveable—PSI contacted GReddy for one of its T618-Z twin-turbo kits. “Rather than going with a big single turbo, which would have huge turbo lag to go along with the huge power potential, we opted for a pair of smaller turbos that gives our GT-R excellent throttle response but still has plenty of top-end power.” In fact, this GReddy kit along with custom PSI intercooler piping and 2-into-1 intake, Top Secret exhaust manifold, Amuse titanium turbo-back exhaust and conservative tuning of the AEM EMS resulted in a very solid 450 whp on 92-octane pump gas at just 18 lbs of boost. With the newly added Tomei cams and a preliminary retune, PSI made 545 whp, where their R34 seems to be maxed out on pump gas.
Where the engine build gets really interesting is with the fuel system. Having done some R&D on ethanol, the PSI team decided to make some serious upgrades to their GT-R’s fuel system so that it could run on E85 or even E98 ethanol. According to Jason, “We’ve seen 6 to 7 percent more power out of ethanol compared to race gas because ethanol cools the intake charge more effectively, letting us get more aggressive with the ignition timing and air/fuel ratio. But because ethanol requires about 30 percent more fuel flow, we had to build a custom high-capacity fuel system including twin in-tank fuel pumps flowing through –10 lines to a Sard fuel rail and 1600cc injectors.”