In my first Fast Fleet blog entry, I recounted how I belatedly realised I could not afford to replace Godzilla 2 with what would have been Godzilla 3, the 2011 GT-R I’d ordered from Middlehurst Motorsport. Having also realised I could not bear to be without a GT-R, I was left stuck with what was now a bog standard 2009 GT-R, when I was used to 612hp of Cobb/Akrapovic goodness.

Thankfully I had a long conversation with Iain Litchfield of Litchfield Imports who persuaded me to try his company for the GT-R’s two year service and offered to refit all my old tuning goodies for an extremely reasonable price.

So back in May, I managed to squeeze my dismantled Akrapovic Evolution titanium exhaust system into the interior along with the Cobb air intakes and Injector Dynamics 1000cc/minute fuel injectors and Cobb AccessPort remapping device in boxes, and headed west to Litchfield Imports’ Gloucestershire base.

Although obviously not a Nissan High Performance Centre, Litchfield’s have become recognised as the independent GT-R service centre of choice.

I had a very pleasant chat with Iain whilst his guys got to work performing the two year service, which in my case also involved replacing the hard wearing Willall transmission fluid I’d used for the last year and a bit.

I had a drive in his 2011 demo car which was running about 600hp at the time with simply an ECUtek remap and exhaust and was deeply impressive (and caused no small twinge of regret and envy as it was also in the gorgeous Daytona metallic blue I’d ordered my own 2011 car in).

I then had lunch with the owner of another 2009 GT-R, who was there for a service and yet had somehow resisted tuning his car, despite having brought it to Iain’s for servicing for over a year.

It took only the mildest of my mind tricks to turn him to the Dark Side and he succumbed to a Stage 2 remap and full Milltek exhaust, which Iain’s guys managed to add to their list of jobs for the day.

They refitted my Akrapovic (which Iain is also a dealer for), the Cobb intakes and ID 1000 injectors without any issues and I plugged the AccessPort into the OBD port to reinstall my GTC custom maps. It was such a relief to press the red Start button and be rewarded with sweet titanium music after having lived with the offensively inoffensive standard system for a couple of months.

Needless to say the drive home was infinitely more enjoyable than the drive there and not just because I didn’t have to worry about 86mm titanium exhaust pipes clouting me on the head on tight corners.

Godzilla had its growl and its grunt back and I felt whole again.