Sticky: (Official) 370Z Clutch Pressure (CSC) Failures

Denny McLain

A little more feedback..........At about 18K miles on a trip from Dallas to Houston I pulled in to get gas and joined the "clutch hit the floor and stuck" club. Anyway it was fixed by the dealer but had to return it a couple of times as they did a poor job bleeding the slave unit.

Move ahead to 43K miles.... Started acting up again. Not a complete failure, but the only way it would work was to pump the hell out of it. Thinking all it needed was to be bleed, went to a local shop near my house and they bleed the unit. Worked fine for about a day and had to return the car for the same issue. After reading a service bulletin from Nissan, they replaced the fluid with GTR fluid and it felt great.......for about another day. They thought the fluid might be boiling off so I took a rubber fuel line, split it in half and covered the hydraulic line with it to insulate it from the exhaust heat. Same deal, worked fine for a couple of days and then went back it's old ways.

Being the car is basically babied with a total 3 trips down a 1/4th mile track (btw...13.08 @ 109.78) and the stock clutch stunk after the third pass. That combined with the design issues, decided to replace everything with aftermarket parts! I called Joe @ Zspeed and he felt the issue was the master cylinder. Not interested in more issues, I went for a stage II South Bend disk and pressure plate, Zspeed slave and new master cylinder. He tried to talk me into a single piece flywheel, but I have zero interest in listening to the trans rattle in neutral so I stayed with the stock unit.

After about 200 miles of break-in this is a much better unit than stock. Smoother, slightly more pedal pressure and better holding power. Turn the traction control off and it puts down some serious rubber at the 1-2 shift and 2-3 shift. Still a bit fickle regarding progressive feel, but an improvement. We'll see how long it lasts. Went from a Corvette with an aggressive ceramic disc to a 370z and the 370 definitely is harder to get a feel for. Better, but still not as smooth as it should be.

Denny