Nissan Skyline R30

The R30 is where Sakurai's Skyline got smaller and sharper on purpose. Four- and six-cylinder cars shared a front end of the same length for the first time, ending the long-nose GT and short-nose TI split that had defined the C210, and Nissan's own framing was that a tighter car looked fresher. The surf line crease over the rear arch, carried since the second generation, was dropped here. Four bodies were offered and one is unique to this generation: a five-door liftback the Skyline never had before or since. The two-door stayed a pillarless hardtop with roll-down rear quarter windows. The wagon again got its own lamps and headlights and, as before, none of the good engines. Four round tail lamps stayed on everything except the wagon. The design event is the August 1983 RS nose. Slim headlamps, no radiator grille at all, and a bonnet sloping down into two narrow slits above a new bumper and air dam. Owners named it 鉄仮面, iron mask, and that name belongs to that nose on that model rather than to the generation as a whole.

The R30 has two racing careers and they barely overlap. The first is the Tomica Skyline Turbo, which contested the Fuji Super Silhouette Series under Group 5 rules from 1982 to 1984. Nissan's GT-R Works built it on a Nova Engineering steel tubular spaceframe with Mooncraft bodywork, and it shared essentially nothing with the road car but its outline. The engine was an LZ20B, 2,083cc, twin Garrett T05B turbochargers, roughly 570 PS, in a car weighing 1,005kg. Masahiro Hasemi won twice in 1982 and five times in 1983, eight wins from seventeen races in all, and it ran the Kyalami 9 Hours in 1982. The second happened in Australia, after the R30 had gone out of production. Gibson Motorsport's factory-backed Nissan Team debuted the DR30 at the opening round of the 1986 Australian Touring Car Championship. George Fury won four of the ten rounds and lost the title by five points to Robbie Francevic's Volvo. Garry Scott put one on pole for the James Hardie 1000 and finished third with a young Glenn Seton. Nissan took the 1986 manufacturers' title from BMW and shared the 1987 one with them. The same team would win Bathurst with the R32 five years later.

Japan calls this generation the Newman Skyline, and it is one of the odder pieces of car marketing anywhere. Nissan hired Paul Newman, an American film star who was also a serious SCCA racer, to front its Japanese advertising for a car he never raced and probably never drove. The name attached itself to the whole generation in Japanese vernacular, which is a rare thing for an advertising campaign to pull off twice in a row, the C210 before it having become the Skyline Japan by exactly the same route. Nissan then went further and sold a Paul Newman Version in 1983: a top-spec turbo GT-E-S with 15-inch alloys, bronze glass and his signature reproduced on the bonnet. The early cars had run a different line, New Love Skyline, a sequel to the C110's famous campaign. It lost to Newman. At home the FJ20 R30 has kept a following that never faded. There are still dedicated one-make drag racing events for the model in Japan, which is not something many forty-year-old saloons can claim.

Buying an R30 today is mostly a question of what has already happened to it, because these were cheap performance cars in Japan for a very long time. Start with the engine. The FJ20 is a strong unit, but it is also a 1981 twin-cam with no factory support left, and it has spent forty years being tuned. Establish that the FJ20 in the car is the one the chassis plate implies, because dropping an FJ20 into a lesser R30 shell is common and is not always disclosed. On a turbo, check whether the intercooler is there or not, because that alone tells you whether you have a 190 PS car or a 205 PS one. Then rust, which on a Japanese unibody saloon of this age means sills, rear arches, floors, boot floor and the base of the windscreen. None of it is unusual and none of it is hard to repair; finding correct panels is the slow part. Parts are the ongoing reality of ownership. Mechanical items shared with the wider Nissan range are fine. Body panels, glass, lamps, badges and interior trim are Japanese-market, out of production, and a hunt through specialist channels rather than a purchase.