This was one of many events that happened shortly after I brought my car home which convinced me that this car was charmed. The few issues I have encountered have been unexpectedly easy to fix. To wit:
I will embarrasingly admit that I did not notice the car was in safety boost until after I had brought it home. I have some good excuses about that but they do not matter at this point. Let's just say there were distractions, and the car otherwise ran so great that I got caught up in the moment.
The car was definitely in safety boost or what is sometimes referred to as "limp mode." That meant the car's computer brain was electronically limiting the maximum amount of boost the turbos would generate because of a perceived problem. Safety boost is mainly intended to be a protective measure against detonation.
Z owners have spent thousands of dollars and could not get their cars out of safety boost. If I had not previously owned a Z, this gremlin would have been nearly impossible for me to figure out on my own. In fact, I think it may have had a lot to do with why the car changed hands the way it did. The car had new stock turbos installed and I believe it was in safety boost ever since that time. For example, when I asked the kid mechanic at Nissan who was doing my first oil change if he knew what safety boost was, all I got was a blank stare. Bad for the previous owners, good for me.
I luckily identified my car's underlying cause of being in safety boost on this page I had written many years earlier, around 2004. I ran ECU error codes and got a Code 34 for a bad Detonation Sensor Circuit. Then I looked under the hood and could tell someone had perviously been at the connectors because there were cable ties around them. I tried to read my own confusing instructions from the above link about which connector went where. I took a shortcut and simply switched the connectors between the driver side VTC solenoid (blue dot below) and the detonation sensor (yellow dot). This does not harm the car even if the connectors were already correct.
Recheck ECU, Code 55 No Errors! Drive car - stock boost gauge and seat-of-pants confirm NO SAFETY BOOST. As far as I can tell, the previous two and a half owners were driving the car in safety boost but did not know it. Amazing.
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