Originally Posted by
Top Gear Magazine
Lock Up Your Porsches!
Bursting with muscle and not 'nice' at all, this is how next year's Nissan GT-R will look. Godzilla is back...
Boil up the Nissan GT-R mythology and what do you get? A high-proof distillate, part car and part culture. The car was born out of a staid line of big saloons, and turned into an adrenalised bruiser by packing it out with high-tech gadgetry so it emerged as an unlikely but entirely credible rival for 911s and Ferraris, a serial race-winner, a Nürburgring legend and a blazingly memorable road drive.
The culture part coalesces around its almost exclusively Japanese origin and heritage: no one is better than the Japanese at getting weirdly obsessive about something, especially if it's something the rest of the world, literally and metaphorically, doesn't get.
But now the GT-R is breaking out. The new generation isn't saloon-derived, but uses its own unique sports car bodyshell. And unlike previous generations, this one will be global.
No longer will the only non-Japanese sales be the Australians and a tiny number of individually homologated British cars; from now, Europe and the US will be able to get a slice of GT-R action.
So with those two critical pillars gone, surely Nissan was tempted to reposition the new GT-R. Didn't it want to morph it into a traditional lower-than-a-catseye supercar silhouette? Didn't it aim for the internationally understood package of supercar cliches? Did it heck.
Shiro Nakamura, Nissan's design chief, insists there's no way a GT-R should follow the pack. "There's no need for it to be a sleek-looking car. The strength of a GT-R is its presence. It has a substantial volume. It's totally different from the sleek, low - maybe too low - supercars.
"That gives it a very unique positioning among Porsches and Lamborghinis and Ferraris. It has top-end performance, but it's not just a two-seater. Plus it has good visibility, and you can get into and out of it easily. We had to retain the 2+2 packaging too. Because it's practical it could be bought as an addition to a European sports car, or as your only car.
"That's why we didn't go low and sleek, even though we had total freedom, because it shares nothing - zero - with any Skyline saloon this time." In fact, Nissan will probably not call this a Skyline GT-R at all, but simply a GT-R. There are still Skyline saloons and coupes (sold as the Infiniti G series in the US), but there's no visual link.
So there are good logical reasons for making the car relatively boxy. But, c'mon, what part does logic play on Planet Supercar? Historical and cultural touchstones matter more, and matter quite desperately to Nakamura and his fellow custodians of the GT-R heritage:
"The GT-R started as a four-door Skyline saloon, very boxy. The second GT-R was a two-door coupe, and then the R32 [the first four-wheel-drive version] was still saloon-based. We wanted to maintain that GT-R DNA.
"The styling comes from the history, because the GT-R line didn't start out as a pure sports car. Anyway, I think the slight boxiness is a Japanese characteristic. It challenges the history of European and American sports cars. In fact, the message of the new GT-R is very challenging."
Damn right, it's challenging. Just look at the sheer hard-body muscle of the thing, the uncompromising countenance. This shape is actually the second 'new' GT-R concept; its predecessor was simply deemed to be "too nice" says Nakamura.
'The new GT-R Proto isn't "nice" at all. It shows its mechanical strength, like a robot'
That first concept was wheeled before the lights of the 2001 Tokyo show. By announcing on that day that there would indeed eventually be a new GT-R, Nissan chief Carlos Ghosn could deliver some sort of pep pill to Nissan, an antidote to his frantic axe-swinging elsewhere across the company.
"We thought the 2001 concept was strong at the time, but now I think it was too smooth," opines Nakamura. "The new GT-R Proto isn't 'nice' at all. It shows its mechanical strength, like a robot."
That name, GT-R Proto, is a bit of a worry. It tells us this is a show car, and I try out on Nakamura my personal list of adorable show cars that found themselves watered down for production. He looks me straight in the eye:
"This show car is not a show car. OK, the front end will change and get more realistic. You can't use carbon fibre like that on a production car. But the sides, the tyre size, the windscreen angle, the whole rear view, the proportions, there's no cheating there.
"The body design is done to fit what is exactly the final mechanical package, so it won't change. You won't be disappointed."
The design is by Hiroshi Hasegawa. Stare at it for long enough and it becomes a thing of wonder. First, the brutality smites you, of course. How could it not? Then the two or three signature shapes - that shoulder blade aft of the front wheel, the assembly of roof and two-dimensionally kinked C-pillar.
Next you spot all the GT-R cues: wheels, stance, rear arches, the four circular tail-lamps. But eventually you latch on to the subtlety and originality of the surfacing: the way so many of the feature lines stand just proud of their surrounding surfaces, like wire formers pulling at an elastic skin. There's enough lasting interest here that it won't date any time soon.
"The solidity and sharp lines are all part of the 'GT-R-ness', and the Japanese origins. It's not at all streamlined," Hasegawa says. But if not overtly streamlined, it is painstakingly aerodynamic and has spent time in the wind tunnel.
Outlet vents snuggle behind that front shoulder blade, and Hasegawa insists they're functional - though in deference to Nissan's ongoing news blackout on the car's technical features, he won't say where the hot air comes from.
'The solidity and sharp lines are all part of the "GT-R-ness", and the Japanese origins'
The roof, too, is carefully shaped for the wind - the shaft section of the roof and the rear glass are slightly recessed, and the shaping of the C-pillar is designed to manage the coming-together of the air passing along the side of the car and the flow over the top.
In fact, the C-pillar is the part of the car most people have an argument with. "I'm always being asked about it," says Hasegawa when I ask him about it. Oops, sorry.
Still, he's got a good answer. Several, in fact. "It has functional aerodynamic origins. It gives a recognisable character - a smooth fastback wouldn't be as memorable. And it means the base of the C-pillar is the familiar GT-R shape."
At the front of the glasshouse, the blacked-out pillars throw the visual centre of gravity backward, he explains, and gives a wraparound look to the glazing.
A distinctive glasshouse is vital in a car like this, Nakamura says, because when it's turned into a racer, the top half of the car is all that stays unmolested. The bottom half's design gets thoroughly poleaxed once it's been subject to a racing team's stretched wheelarches, sponsor decals, paint schemes and the singed trails of side exhausts spitting game.
Staring at the surface just increases the frustration of not knowing what's underneath. Because the car doesn't launch until October 2007, Nissan still refuses to divulge anything, beyond saying the mighty twin-turbo straight-six of the old R34 GT-R is deceased.
Right then. There are twin bonnet bulges, implying a V engine, and when you propose that to the insiders they don't try to correct you. A V8 would suit the Infiniti brand, but would that be a true GT-R engine? Porsche 911s are fine with six.
So the smart money's on a compact, light V6. Nakamura says it'll have "a lot" more power than the R34. That listed at 280bhp - although it actually made more. The 350Z's V6 makes 280-plus these days.
But add twin turbos and you're easily up to the 400-450bhp that Carlos Ghosn has hinted at. Well-founded rumour says Cosworth is involved.
Nakamura confirms the real car will use the same 20-inch rims as the concept and the same tyre sizes: 255/40 at the front, 285/35 at the rear, a sure sign that extra power is coursing down to the road. The fancy 4WD system has been as central to the GT-R experience as the turbocharged muscle, so they won't be dropping that.
'The smart money's on a compact, light V6. Nakamura says it'll have "a lot" more power than the R34'
But something gnaws at me. Might the new global mission might mean more performance also comes with milder manners, a dilution of the bare-knuckle intensity and hardwired car-to-driver connection of the GT-R experience?
The Japanese were always prepared to accept the noise and the punishing ride of the R32 to R34 generations, because they are marinated in GT-R culture.
They have the folk memory of GT-Rs winning the most important race in the country, the JAF Japan Grand Prix, from the mid-Sixties on. They watched the R32 GT-R win first time out in the Japanese Touring Car Championship, and go on winning for every single race through the 1990 to 1993 seasons.
They congregate at owners' club meetings, mixing with thousands of believers all done up in their Nismo regalia, many arriving to show off modded specials with turbos the size of dustbins and carbon-.fibre propshafts. Buy a GT-R in Japan and you're buying a legend.
But buy one in the US and you're probably an up-and-coming orthodontist buying a fast Nissan. You're probably going to want an automatic 'box and a softened freeway ride.
Will Nissan feel it needs to oblige these customers? Let it not be so. There's too much at stake. These pics show the designers have done right by the GT-R. Let's hope the engineers are allowed to as well.
Paul Horrell
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