Nissan GT-R R35

Shiro Nakamura, Nissan's design director, set the brief that the car could not look like a European sports car wearing Japanese badges, and he meant it literally. The aero-blade front fenders, the blacked-out A-pillars and the way the roofline runs down into the rear haunches were drawn from the giant robots of the Gundam series. Samurai armour and musical notation were also on the reference wall. Hiroshi Hasegawa was chief designer, and roughly fifty proposals reached Nakamura before one was chosen. Exactly one element was inherited outright, and Nakamura treated it as non-negotiable: four round tail lamps, the signature every GT-R has worn since 1969. None of it was shaped for the wind tunnel first, though the numbers arrived anyway, 0.27 drag at launch and 0.26 from 2010. The 2017 facelift is easy to spot once you know it: a larger V-motion grille, the vertical louvers under the splitter straightened up, a reworked bonnet, and vents alongside the four exhaust tips. Inside, that same year, the paddles finally moved from the steering column onto the wheel.

The R35's competition record is better than most people assume, and almost none of it involves the road car's mechanicals. The headline is 2011, when Michael Krumm and Lucas Luhr took the FIA GT1 World Championship drivers' title in the JR Motorsports GT-R with four wins. It was Nissan's first world championship of any kind, and the first world circuit-racing title won by a Japanese car. The teams' title slipped away after a first-lap incident in the Argentine finale. At home the GT-R took the Super GT GT500 championship in 2008 with Satoshi Motoyama and Benoît Tréluyer, in 2011 and 2012 with Masataka Yanagida and Ronnie Quintarelli, and again in 2014 and 2015 with Tsugio Matsuda and Quintarelli. Those were silhouette racers wearing the shape rather than developed road cars. The one that closed a circle was the customer GT3 car at the 2015 Bathurst 12 Hour. Katsumasa Chiyo passed two cars on the final lap to win it, sharing with Wolfgang Reip and Florian Strauss, both graduates of Nissan's GT Academy. It was the first Bathurst victory for a GT-R since the R32 in 1992.

No car is more thoroughly entangled with a video game. Nissan hired Polyphony Digital, the studio behind Gran Turismo, to design the R35's multi-function display, the screen reporting g-force, throttle position, brake pressure and steering angle, and Kazunori Yamauchi was given a GT-R for the work. The car appeared in Gran Turismo 5 Prologue in 2007, the year it was unveiled. The pipeline ran both ways. GT Academy took gamers off the console and put them in race cars, and two of its graduates were aboard the GT-R that won Bathurst in 2015. In Britain it arrived through Top Gear, when Jeremy Clarkson drove one across Japan against Richard Hammond and James May on the Shinkansen in July 2008. And it inherited a name it never earned. Godzilla was coined by Australia's Wheels magazine in July 1989 for the R32. Owners and the press attach it to the R35 as a matter of course, while purists insist it belongs to one car and one car only, and they have a point worth hearing.

The R35 is a robust car with one long-running argument attached to it. Owners used the factory launch control, which required stability control to be switched off, gearboxes broke, and Nissan initially declined warranty cover on exactly that basis. A class action followed in 2009 and was settled with a transmission software update for 2009 owners and an agreement not to deny coverage for prior stability-control-off use, Nissan denying fault throughout. For 2010 the terms hardened further: refusing a dealer access to the car's data recorder voided the warranty. Fifteen years on, the practical list is short. The bellhousing bearing rattles, usually somewhere between 40,000 and 80,000 km, on any model year. Transmission solenoids and pressure sensors collect debris and heat, and a failed sensor drops the car into limp mode. Neither is fatal and both are solved problems with known parts. The rest is consumables at supercar rates, because that is what the car is. One owner's seven-year, 48,000-mile record ran to $7,700 in tyres alone. Nothing here is fragile. The R35 is simply used hard, by people who bought it to be used hard.