A Nissan engineer named Ito Naganori remembers being asked, in June 1985, to come and look at a prototype. It was a two-door Skyline, Nissan's sports sedan. Ito was new to the job. The man who had led the Skyline for years, Sakurai Shinichiro, had fallen ill, and Ito had taken over a car that was almost finished.
As Ito tells it, the prototype already had GT-R badges, front and back. GT-R was the name of the Skyline's high-performance version, and Nissan had not sold one since 1973.
Shortly before, journalists had test-driven the four-door version of the same car. As Ito recalled it, they were brutal: it doesn't go, the engine won't rev. The prototype had the same engine.
"Take them off!" he said, on the spot. In his own words, a GT-R was not a car you could put out easily, and putting that name on an engine people had just called slow would only invite the same criticism again.
The name comes back
It did not save the car. When the Skyline went on sale that August, critics and owners were still unkind. Ito said he had not expected it to be criticised so hard. The car had been nearly finished when he took it over.
He wanted the next Skyline to answer back. By his account, Nissan was then heading for its first loss since it was founded, and asking for a GT-R would have got nowhere. So inside the company the project went by another name: GT-X.
The next Skyline, the R32, was announced in May 1989. The GT-R version went on sale on 21 August, sixteen years after the last one. Overseas it picked up a nickname, Godzilla.
See it yourself
- Nissan Crossing, Ginza. Nissan's showroom is the first stop on our JDM tour, and it features the GT-R NISMO.
Hear it on the tour
Planning a visit?
Our Tokyo JDM tour guide explains where car culture happens in Tokyo, what you can and can't expect to see, and how access works.
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