Background
Following the startling racing success of Nissan’s original Skyline GT-R of 1969-1973, racers and enthusiasts were forced to wait 16 years for its eventual successor, the R32-generation GT-R that arrived in 1989. Endowed with amazing roadholding with all-wheel drive, the R32 Skyline GT-R utterly dominated Japanese Touring Car competition, earning four straight championships. The R32 Skyline GT-R benefited particularly well from development in Australia that profoundly influenced Nissan’s own Nismo (Nissan Motorsport) group and culminated in back-to-back Australian Touring Car Championships in 1991 and 1992. Ironically, those controversial wins brought about the end of the GT-R in Australian circuit racing, spurring court-mandated rule changes that nullified its many advantages by 1993. Rightly, these cars earned the fierce, yet whimsical nickname “Godzilla” by the motoring press for their crushing performance and flame-spitting exhaust, with that appellation still in force some 30 years later.
Production of the legendary R32 spanned 1989 to the advent of the R33 evolution of the Skyline GT-R series debuted in August 1993, ushering in a wide array of welcome stylistic, mechanical and safety enhancements. R33 styling was penned by Kozo Watanabe and production ran 1993-98. In 1995, an R32 GT-R driven by Motoharu Kurosawa became the fastest road-legal production car on the Nürburgring’s hotly contested Nordschleife circuit, a record broken in 1996 by an even mightier R33 GT-R V-Spec model, driven by Dirk Schoysman.
