In last week’s video, the staff at RML showed us that stuffing a Nissan GT-R’s engine into a Nissan Juke wasn’t exactly a shade-tree-mechanic kind of project. Chassis fabrication aside, keeping the GT-R’s engine cool when embedded between the Juke’s front fenders took a substantial amount of engineering.
Adapting the GT-R’s drivetrain for use in the Juke is no simple task, either. Since the GT-R uses a transaxle instead of a conventional transmission, two prop shafts (one from the engine to the transaxle, and a second from the transaxle to the front differential) are needed for the GT-R’s all-wheel-drive system.
Since the Juke is 250 mm shorter than the GT-R, custom prop shafts had to be fabricated from steel, instead of the carbon fiber used on the GT-R. As we’ve seen in previous videos, the Juke’s chassis had to be stiffened to counter “torsional activity,” which is engineer-speak for flexing of the Juke’s unibody.
Next week’s video covers the interior development, including seat fitment and ergonomics. Now that the bulk of the engineering work has been completed, the rest of the Juke-R should go together with relative ease.