My dad had a gas station in Houston when I was just a knee-high ball of curls, and occasionally, when he would come home at the end of the day, he’d tell me about all the cool cars he had seen. Thing is, I didn’t know them then as what cars they actually were; I knew them as what they were on TV, like if he told me Peter Weller was outside, I’d be unfazed, but if he said RoboCop…?
“A guy came by with the General Lee today!” or “A man brought the Ghostbusters car to the station!” would send my child brain into a frenzy imagining the Duke boys jumping through the Challenger’s windows after talking to my dad or a Ghostbuster handing out toys.
20-some-odd years later, me and the car from Gran Turismo/Top Gear/Fast 5 stop at a country gas station for something to drink.
“William Wallace is 7 feet tall!”
In a relatively short time, the Nissan GT-R hasn’t just developed a reputation, it’s garnered a legend. Indeed, discussions about the car sound more like the mythical exploits whispered in a Braveheart montage, with its manufacturing processes and capabilities becoming more amazing with every telling. Before the inevitable refresh, the car will go 300mph and have an MSRP of $10.77, maintaining its rarity by being exclusively available through the blackmail of scurrilous wood nymphs. It would be a textbook example of “never meet your heroes” if it wasn’t so damn amazing.
In person, the GT-R is just as imposing as it looks in photos: large, solid, and intimidating. Approaching it from the front and hearing its idling engine is like walking up to a suit of samurai armor, slowly discovering that there is a pensive ronin inside, peering at you through the mask. Its mythic status doesn’t diminish when one climbs inside, since the multifunction display was designed by Polyphony Digital, developers of the Gran Turismo game series. Anyone who’s spent time with the games will feel reality slightly alter when driving the actual sports car with the fonts, gauges, and graphics burned into their synapses as real, non-videogame data is displayed. The display has 11 pages of menus, each with different configurations of mechanical and performance info that can be monitored in real time, or recorded to be studied later, and this is without mentioning the navigation and entertainment abilities. “There must be a 0-60 timer in here somewhere,” I mused, sifting through the channels. There was.
Well, here we are….
My thoughts about having all of the GT-R’s 530 hp at my disposal in my unsupervised jaunt ran wild, as I had this car’s wheel in my hands and the serene, brochure-worthy back roads in front of me. I decided on one particular stretch that this was as good a spot as any to tap the potential the Nissan held within its mind-blowing 3.8L twin turbo V6. There is a launch mode featured in the car, but a string of thoughts ran through my mind (…you’ve never driven this car before man this unfamiliar road is narrow where is it in this menu setup it took me this long just to find the timer you really should try to bring this back in one piece fuck it let’s light this pig…), so I opted out, and took off.
So much happens so fast: My foot plants the throttle to the floor, and the roar in my ears tells my eyes to look at the rev meter, which signals me to make my hands flick the paddles. Stalwart photographer Jon says “time”, and we break. The timer reads 4.0 seconds. I know this is inaccurate, because I know that it took me at least a tenth of a second to get my thumb to hit the timer button on the steering wheel.
Ironing out the road….
Balancing out the power of the GT-R in the front is the rear mounted 6-gear dual clutch transmission, which audibly clunks behind the driver’s head when downshifting. The backdrop of woods streaked past as the stretch of road ahead manifested a variety of bends, curves that would usually present a challenge, but the Independent double wishbone suspension and Independent multi-link suspension made short work of them. It occurred to me here, that when various automotive presenters and reviewers discuss the GT-R’s lack of “soul” and “passion” (and I, as a reader, roll my eyes), they might be onto something. The car made what would be an exciting run at 90mph seem like cruising at 60. The issue here is much like giving a gifted student mundane busy work. Back roads and highways present little challenge for the GT-R, and cutting through them is boringly easy. I had no such opportunity to offer the powerful, tech-savvy coupe.
Beauty marks
Priced at around $90,000 ($106,320 MSRP for the 2013 Black Edition), not to mention the competitive resale value, one would imagine that anyone with the means would be flooding our streets. It seems like a no-brainer: Why not buy the “perfect car,” the Nurburgring-mastering, supercar-trouncing powerhouse? For one, sterner consumers may not want to drive a car designed to resemble a Japanese anime robot. For a mild increase in price, shoppers may be more tempted by the other affordable AWD daily supercar, the sexy Audi R8. There’s also the Corvette buyers, the Viper guys, and the Shelby crowd. Yeah, these rides may not be breaking swathes of records, but they are fun to drive in the world that most of us live in. Kazutoshi Mizuno, chief vehicle engineer, said himself that the GT-R development team avoided most tracks during the development of the car because they were “too easy.” That’s great to hear when looking for the perfect car, but sometimes, we’re not.
The GT-R is a flawless exercise in developing a powerful car that’s reasonably affordable, looks great, and makes high-speed driving a breeze. It also transitions very easily into daily driving, as long as you don’t have more than one passenger and you don’t mind mobs of teenagers surrounding you at mall parking lots. Those with the means who are looking for a car that will challenge their skills may want to look elsewhere, but those looking for the best need look no further.
Words By – Alex Kalogiannis
Photos By – Jon Rouzier
It occurs to me that maybe the hero you should not have met was not the GT-R, but rather the very concept of the perfect affordable super car. Often you hear men squabbling amongst themselves at local watering holes about what car they would buy if “money were no object”. The truth is 99% of the time, this nearly moot debate is as close as most men will ever come to owning any of the cars they will mention. The outlier of course being the GT-R. The GT-R seems like the lottery, you know it doesn’t make sense but you keep hearing that unrelenting sound of “what if”, coming from inside your soul.
Further more, one must ask themselves, if any of these ham fisted, beer guzzling burger aficionados have ever actually driven a true “super car”. In the real world, how many of us have really gotten to spend the day making short work of local highways in a MC4-12C or a SLS. When the Duke boys jumped into that car in your imagination, they perfectly handled 60 degree high speed turns and jumping over 10 ft broken bridges with the utmost confidence and ease.
Maybe then, that is the true hero. The car that lets you feel like the hero. If I (your average everyday driver) can get behind the wheel of this monster and feel like I was accomplishing feats that were once reserved for the likes of stunt drivers and europeans, well then I think this is car I can’t help but fall in love with.