THERE WAS a point, the other day, when I was driving the 507bhp Jaguar XFR and thinking to myself: ‘Nothing feels truly fast any more’. You can drive any number of cars that do 0-62mph between four seconds and seven, and they all feel rapid, no doubt about it, but not terrifyingly so. Maybe, I wondered, I’d become insensate.
The R35 Nissan GT-R, however, has set an enormous fire under my backside just to ensure I’m not clinically dead. I was only a passenger as Simon took the first stint behind the wheel of this cyborg, but as my brain turned rapidly to scrambled egg, I grasped wildly at the door handles in a heady mix of fear and exultation; despite being a big car, it manages to pull off the trick of the tiny machine – think of travelling in an original (proper) Mini and it always seems like you are going twice as fast as you are. Well, the GTR does the same – 30mph feels like 60, 60 like 120. And when the damned thing can do 0-150mph in 20.3 seconds, you kind of get an idea of how ludicrously fast the GTR feels.
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It’s one of those cars that is hard, in every possible respect of the word. It rides hard. It looks hard. It sounds hard, as the V6 shrieks and warbles like no other six-pot I’ve ever heard, breathing as it does through quad exhausts so large you can shove your fist into the huge diameter exit pipes… er, should you enjoy that sort of thing. The steering and brakes and gears all feel hard, which is not a criticism – just the best way of describing how utterly honed all these reponses are. There’s not an ounce of slop in any single component fitted to the Nissan, no insinuation that the engineers have keyed in any remorse or safety-first nannying. It’s just triple-distilled, muscled madness.
Rarely does big grip, big technology and big performance equate to a big bundle of fun. Only its firm ride will put off some big jessies.
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Perfect driving position and a dashboard dripping with megabytes, it can only be a Skyl... Sorry GTR.
Nothing – nothing – compares to its sense of speed. This thing is one thousand, seven hundred and thirty kilos, stripped of all fluids. Stick a tank of fuel in and two hacks who’ve enjoyed life to the full and we’re talking about two tonnes of road-going matter, hurtling here, there and everywhere with the kind of vim and vigour you might expect of a JGTC car.
The thing is, I bet you want to hate it, don’t you? You’ll be sitting there, harrumphing and saying: “Yeah, but it’s all electronics and turbos and silly technology… it’s not a purist’s driving car.” Oh, how I wanted to agree with you. To dismiss this as frighteningly efficient and cold, a masterpiece of Japanese know-how but not seriously the choice of the driver with petrol in his heart.
But I can’t. It is sensational. Amazing. A true driving enthusiast’s wet dream made of metal, rubber and leather (steady on at the back, there!). It is sublime. A switch of drivers and now I’m experiencing that soul-corrupting performance first hand. And, unusually, it feels quicker in the driver’s seat than in the passenger chair. This is probably because my feeble human brain is incapable of processing information as fast as the Nissan relentlessly shoves it your way. The steering is a marvel, better than any Japanese set-up I’ve ever encountered – firm, full of feel and ideally weight for the 4WD delivery. The grip is just stupid. There is absolutely no way on God’s green Earth you should be capable of crashing one of these things on the road; forgive the cliché, but it really does feel like a Scalextric car sized up to human proportions. It goes round corners like the video of a normal motor, comically sped up in the editing suite.
But this grip does not mean that the chassis leaves you emotionally bereft. Because the Nissan dances quite mesmerisingly through all manner of corners. It feels as if there is a slight tendency to oversteer – always a GT-R trait – if anything, but in general it is perfect, precision neutrality. It’s the R35’s ‘small car’ trick again – you throw it about the place as if it were a 900kg hot hatch.
