Nissan GT-R Track Edition - £88,560
Think hard before you hit the throttle in the camber gambler
Published: 20 December 2015
IN MY most recent review of the Nissan GT-R I said it was pretty much perfect
in every way and declared at the end that it’s not a five-star car. It’s the
five-star car. I stand by that. If you want to go fast, in any weather, on
any road, there is simply nothing else that even gets close.
You know the space shuttle. The pictures would suggest that it lumbered off
the launchpad as though it were getting out of bed after a heavy night, but
nothing could be further from the truth. When the restraining bolts were
released and those 37m-horsepower engines could do their thing, it exploded
upwards so vigorously that it was doing 120mph before its tail had cleared
the gantry.
Anyone familiar with the Nissan GT-R would call that “a bit pedestrian”. Maybe
on a sweeping ribbon of tarmac in the Scottish Highlands on a dry, hot,
sticky day the McLaren P1 could just about keep up. But it’s doubtful. And
what makes this so extraordinary is that the Nissan has four seats and a big
boot and to the casual observer appears to be “just a car”.
I have no idea why Nissan makes it. It costs a little over £78,000, so the
margins must be small. So is the volume. Which means the company probably
makes more money each year from its factory-floor vending machines. And it’s
not as though the GT-R creates any form of meaningful halo for Nissan’s
other cars. Nobody in the world has ever said: “Ooh, I admire the GT-R’s
ability to get round the Nürburgring in four seconds so I shall buy a Juke
immediately.” The GT-R sits in the Nissan line-up in the same way as a
Fabergé egg would sit on the shelves of your local Lidl.
Nissan GT-R Track Edition
I suspect Nissan makes the GT-R primarily to keep its engineers awake and
loyal. Most companies put photographs of their employees of the month on a
wall in reception. But at Nissan if you do good work on the rear light
cluster of the dreary Kumquat SUV you are allowed to develop a differential
for the GT-R.
That’s great, but how do you reward your brightest and best when there will be
no new GT-R for at least five years? Simple. You let them make the existing
car even better.
This recently resulted in the Nismo version. I have not driven it but I gather
from speaking to the hollowed-out, mumbling wrecks who have that it’s almost
stupid in its ability to bend, break and then eat the laws of physics.
I’m also told that while it works extremely well on a track, it’s far too raw
to work on a road. Think of it, then, as a scuba suit. You need it if you
want to look at a turtle, but it doesn’t really work on the Tube or in
meetings with clients.
So now Nissan has come up with the Track Edition, which is supposed to be a
halfway house. You get the standard car’s V6 twin-turbo engine and the
standard car’s interior fixtures and fittings. But you get the Nismo’s
handling tweaks. Which include this: glue to supplement the spot-welds and
make the body even stiffer.
This is the sort of thing that makes an enthusiast of the brand need to repair
to the lavatory for a little “me time”. To the people who populate GT-R
internet forums a car that uses glue as well as spot-welds for added
stiffness is way beyond Angelina Jolie and Scarlett Johansson in a bath of
warm milk.
This is all part of the GT-R legend. It’s a car that is built in a
hermetically sealed factory and has tyres full of nitrogen because normal
air is too unpredictable. It uses an engine that’s built by one man and is
mounted out of kilter to the transmission so that when you accelerate and
the torque causes it to rock backwards, all is in perfect harmony. No one
can tell if any of this stuff actually makes any difference. But knowing the
car was built this way makes its fans priapic.
There’s a problem, though. Because the body is now so stiff and the suspension
is so unforgiving, the car is completely undriveable on the road. It’s so
bad that after one run from London to Oxford and back I parked it in my
garage and have not even looked at it since.
There is no give. At all. Drive over a manhole cover and you get some idea of
what it might be like to be involved in a plane crash. You actually feel the
top of your spine bouncing off the inside of your skull.
Jimmy Carr was in the passenger seat and after less than half a mile he asked
if the sat nav was programmed only to take the occupants to the nearest
chiropractor.
But I wasn’t really listening because the Track Edition was serving up another
unwanted party piece: any minor camber change in the road surface causes it
to veer violently left or right. I’m always hesitant to say that a car is
dangerous because it’s a legal minefield, but this one gets bloody close.
Twice in just an hour I very nearly had an accident because of the sudden
and unexpected changes in direction.
It wouldn’t have been a big accident because it happens mostly at slow speed
but it would have been annoying and embarrassing explaining to the driver
whose car I’d hit why I’d suddenly driven into his door for no reason.
Naturally you’d expect that on a track there would be some upside to these
issues — but I can’t answer that because driving this car to a racing
circuit to find out would be too uncomfortable and too fraught with danger.
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