Nissan Skyline GT-R C10

Hako means box, and the C10's slab sides, upright glass and flat surfaces earned the name honestly. The GT-R takes that plain saloon and adds only what the racing required: steel arches rolled out over wider wheels, a chin spoiler, a bootlid lip, and on most cars a set of five-spoke wheels that have been copied endlessly since. The badging is deliberately restrained. No stripes, no bonnet scoop, just a small round GT-R badge on a car that looks like something the family down the road might own, which is a large part of why it is loved. The coupe of October 1970 is the shape that carried the legend: shorter, pillarless, with a hardtop roofline and the arches doing more visual work over less body. The four round tail lamps, two per side, arrived on the C10 and became a Skyline signature that ran unbroken to the R34 and on into the R35. Very few design cues survive thirty-six years intact.

This is the record the whole nameplate rests on, and Nissan's own heritage archive documents it race by race. The first win came on 3 May 1969, in the TS-b race supporting the JAF Grand Prix at Fuji, in the PGC10 sedan. From there the Skyline won and kept winning: fifty victories in two years and ten months, forty-nine of them consecutive, twenty-one of them at Fuji. The saloons did the bulk of it before the coupe joined the team in March 1971. The streak ended in December 1971 when Mazda's rotary-engined Savanna RX-3 took overall victory at the Fuji Tourist Trophy and denied the Skyline its fiftieth, which started a rivalry Japanese enthusiasts still argue about. Nissan got the fiftieth on 20 March 1972 at the Fuji 300km, K. Takahashi driving. The phrase that attached itself to the car in that period was that the Skyline's only rival was the Skyline. Nothing the badge did later, including 29 Group A wins from 29 starts twenty years on, was more formative than this.

In Japan the Hakosuka occupies roughly the position a 1969 Camaro holds in America, except that it also won everything. It is the emblem of the kyusha and shakotan scenes, lowered on deep-dish wheels with an oversized exhaust, and it turns up in manga, in model kits, in Gran Turismo and at every Japanese classic meet worth attending. The name is vernacular, not official: hako for box, suka from sukairain, the Japanese pronunciation of Skyline. Nissan never coined it. Owners did, and it stuck so hard that Nissan's own material now uses it back. Outside Japan the C10 was invisible for decades, because it was never sold new in America or Europe and the badge meant nothing in the West until Australian journalists started writing about the R32 twenty years later. That has reversed completely. The Hakosuka is now the car Western collectors point at to explain that the GT-R story did not begin in 1989, and what a good one costs reflects exactly that.

Owning a Hakosuka is a rust story and a parts story, and every owner will tell you the same two things. Japanese steel of this period was thin and untreated, so sills, rear arches, floors, strut towers and screen surrounds all go, and a car that lived in a coastal prefecture has had work. That is normal and not a disqualifier. What matters is who did it and whether there are photographs. The S20 is the other half. It is beautifully made and reliable when it is right, but it was built in the low thousands, it runs three sidedraught carburettors that want synchronising, and its wear parts are produced in small batches by Japanese specialists who do not always have stock. Valve clearances are shims under buckets and take a day. Expect a relationship with a shop that knows the engine rather than with a local garage. The rest of the car is a 1970 Nissan saloon: simple, well made and mercifully conventional. Nothing about running one is mysterious. It is just specialised, and the specialists are mostly in Japan.