Outside the Nissan West Coast headquarters in the Los Angeles suburb of Gardena, a small crowd of employees is smoking cigarettes and staring into the shop as if they’ve just seen a snake. In one of the engineering bays, a sports car is lurking, and they don’t trust it. Call it a well-developed sense of self-preservation.
The red coupe is intimidating, an unfamiliar profile hunched on huge 18-inch, 245/40ZR tires, disc brakes as big as trash-can lids gleaming behind its mag wheels.
It’s one of the best–some say the best–sports car in the world: A Nissan Skyline R34 GT-R V-Spec. And it’s on loan from the Togichi proving grounds (Nissan’s test track in Japan) to improve morale in a company whose more mundane business has been battered of late.
The Skyline GT-R is a Japan-only sports car that dates to 1966. It’s always been a prestige item in Japan but never connected overseas until the all-wheel-drive GT-R (R32) was introduced in 1989.
In one step, Nissan blended everyday functionality with head-snapping performance.
Since then, things have gotten better. (The enormity of the GT-R’s development is even more remarkable in a country where speed limits are severely restricted, parking is impossible and good manners are taken for granted.) Out of the box, it will carry four people at better than 150 m.p.h., and further tuning makes 200 m.p.h. a distinct possibility.
The heart of the Skyline is a 2.6-liter, 280-horsepower, dual-overhead cam in-line 6-cylinder engine with twin Garrett turbochargers. (The horsepower is limited to 280 by Japanese regulations, but Nissan insiders have said 320 horsepower is more likely). The engine’s offset, which is why it’s right-hand-drive only for now, and behind it is a six-speed Getrag manual transmission and the really smart aspect of the power transmission.
That’s ATTESA ET-S (electronic torque-splitting) all-wheel-drive and HICAS (high-capacity, actively controlled suspension) all-wheel steering.
The bullnose front airdam is the model for every Honda Civic kit. The huge carbon-fiber wing on the back is a serious performance element, reminiscent of Dodge’s Daytona Charger. Like the Charger it’s adjustable for down force. And the car has an undertray that makes it aerodynamically smooth so the car churns up a huge roostertail in the rain.
But the true innovation is inside. Above the center console is a color LCD screen that displays the satellite navigation system but can turn into a database, to show tachometer, boost gauge and bar graphs for oil and water temperatures, injector cycle and exhaust gas temperatures.
There’s also a peak hold function so you can see how high you revved it and how hot the engine got when you were thrashing it–every racer’s dream.
If you’re not satisfied with this, by the way, there’s a performance kit made by HKS that includes a new intercooler and cylinder head and generates an estimated 510 horsepower. Still not enough?
The full-race HKS kit puts out a claimed 950 horsepower at 10,000 r.p.m. The base car will turn a quarter mile in less than 14 seconds. Zero to 60 m.p.h.? Less than 5 seconds. The tricked-out HKS street model does the quarter in less than 12 seconds, with a zero to 60 in less than 4 seconds. Lord knows what the race model will do.
And all this comes in a car that looks, well, regular. Despite the limited supply of these motorized monsters (they sell about 500 a year in Japan), they are available in the U.S. through MotoRex, which runs the www.skylineGT-R.com Web site. It’ll cost you about $85,000 for the latest R34 Skyline and about $89,000 for the faster V-Spec. In Japan A GT-R would cost a little over $55,000. MotoRex also imports some older R33s and has reportedly crash-tested one of each model to satisfy federal regulators.
GT-Rs found their way to Australia and Europe as “gray market” cars but are almost unknown in the U.S. There was talk of Nissan importing the Skyline as an Infiniti (a modified ATTESA system is used in the QX4 sport-utility vehicle), and the idea was greeted with delight by Scott Young, who has been selling Infiniti in Portland since the line was introduced in 1990.
He was particularly excited about the name because Skyline is the most famous twisty road in these parts.
“I’d give my eye teeth just to ride in one,” said Young. “I bet they could sell every one they could build.” He finally gave up on the idea this spring and went to work for Porsche (though he remains convinced the Skyline is unbeatable).
To give you an idea of the “juggling grenades/harnessing peacocks” aspect of the Skyline GT-R-V, a memo was circulated to employees by Steve Mitchell, the head of Nissan’s vehicle service center in Gardena.
It stated:
1. Be careful with it. It’s not a cruiser. It doesn’t stay straight unless you drive it straight. It follows every crack in the road, and you can call heads or tails if you drive over a dime. Don’t be reaching for a CD or grabbing little Johnny while the car is moving. If you’re not comfortable with right-hand-drive don’t drive it. It is a bad car to learn on.
2. NNA (Nissan North America) employees can drive it but they must be “thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.”
3. Don’t ask for English instructions on the stereo or programmable gauges. There aren’t any.
4. Treat it nicely. It’s a gift from the Togichi Proving Ground, meant to inspire, and the car is nothing if not that. But we have no parts for it. If we break something I have to go ask for parts, and I don’t like doing that. If we abuse it, it looks like we don’t appreciate it.
5. Attempt no burn-outs. It’s not a dragster, power comes in at too high an r.p.m. and it’s four-wheel-drive with traction control and 18-inch tires. The weak link is the clutch. It will grenade, and it’s a bitch to replace (see rule No. 4).
6. Enjoy the car; it shows what Nissan can do when it wants to.
Car and Driver once described the Skyline GT-R as “so good it’s scary.”
“What a kick; it handles like my Go-Kart,” said Portland International Raceway Track manager Mark Wigginton. “It seats four in anonymous comfort and pulls forever in whatever gear you’re in. It must be the ultimate suburban Stealth fighter.”
Gary Malloy, Nissan’s engineering investigations manager, arranged to keep the car for a photo shoot–with undexpected consequences. “The office is in an uproar as to who gets it for the weekend,” he said. “Around here, with all the car people and plenty of interesting drives, nobody seems to get excited about many of them. Throw in one GT-R and the scheming begins. . . . The car is a blast to drive. Glendora Mountain Road here I come . . .”
A TURN BEHIND THE WHEEL
As a Brit who grew up on right-hand drive, I was allowed to drive the Nissan Skyline R34 GT-R V-Spec, considered by some the ulitmate sports car, around the industrial area near Nissan’s offices under the watchful eye of Engineering Investigations Manager Gary Malloy.
“Be careful, the cops know we have this,” he said, dryly.
The Skyline is a stunning piece of machinery.
The seats fit tight under the armpits. “They’re not configured for the U.S. market,” said Malloy.
The in-line 6 starts and runs quietly, the driver crouching behind a faceful of gauges.
Step on the gas, and it gradually unspools until the turbos kick in and it shoots away like a Go-Kart. The steering is immediate and you realize that it probably feels like this well past 150 m.p.h.
The sense of absolute control is exhilarating; everything is light and precise.
I’ve owned more than 100 cars and driven a thousand, from a twin-engine Citreon 2CV “Deux Cheveaux” to a 427 Shelby Cobra.
But if I could only have one car, this would be it.
One final note: One of the conditions of the Gardena Skyline’s loan is that it can never be U.S. registered.
“These kind of cars usually get sold to the competition division for about a dollar,” said Malloy, of the nominal matter to make the transfer legal. “That, or they’re crushed.”
