Capsule Review: A Few Days With Godzilla (Plus)

There’s a disclosure at the bottom of this article; read it if you are interested in disclosures — JB

The Nissan GT-R is very fast. The Switzer P800 variant of the GT-R is even faster. On Ohio-style 93 octane fuel, the car will spin the rollers of an AWD dyno for well over seven hundred wheel horsepower. It so happened that a Switzer customer was willing to let me drive his car for a few days. What follows is sure to upset those who are easily upset, so if you think your tummy might not be able to handle stories of outrageous acceleration and on-road speeds, now’s the time to not click the jump.

As I make a left turn out onto the, er, closed course, I am doing ten miles per hour. My friend is holding a Flip camera — not to show anyone the video, but for timing purposes. I floor the throttle. For a moment, there’s no exhaust noise, only a “whoosh” from the spooling turbos. Then the sound starts. It’s like no street motor you have heard. Imagine putting your head into a hornet’s and hearing it agitate at an ever-increasing pitch. Think Senna-era McLaren TAG. It’s simply a head-swallowing angry buzz. Three times there is a shift, an instant drop of revs accompanied by a brief pressure-relief from the turbos that vibrates in my chest. Nine seconds later, the in-dash Polyphony Digital readout passes one hundred and twenty miles per hour. That’s fast enough. From a “dig”, the car would be even faster, since it would have a chance to build boost and pressure before launching past the timing beam and eventually clearing the quarter-mile mark in slightly over ten seconds.

In all other ways besides the engine tuning, this GT-R is completely stock. Still, it has the attitude of a “tuner car”, from the astoundingly poor ride to the herky-jerky motion with which the clutches engage at a stoplight. This ain’t no Volkswagen DSG. Nor is it the Ford Fiesta’s PowerShift, which almost perfectly imitates a torque-converter transmission. No, this car requires practice and delicacy to leave a light without bucking away. It’s noisy in the cockpit and although the comprehensive electronic gauges indicate that the transmission temperature isn’t even on the scale yet, there’s heat radiating from the center console.

My favorite CD of the moment, Linda Dachtyl’s “For Hep Cats”, doesn’t shine on this sound system. Take any comment ever made by some smug, tweed-jacketed audiophile about the Lexus LS “Mark Levinson” installation, reverse its meaning, and you will have an accurate criticism. “The imaging is surprisingly un-reminiscent of the best medieval churches’ sound stages, adjusted with a tasteful placement of acoustic tiling.” I just made that up, but it’s true.

Once again, the Japanese have mistaken steering weight for steering feel. The GT-R’s steering is heavier than that of a Porsche GT2 but doesn’t provide anything like the same information. Most annoyingly, the shifter paddles are fixed to the column. This is THE WRONG WAY and there can be no argument about it. Drag racers won’t care, and neither will the shuffle-steering hacks who make up the ranks of most “time attacks” both here and overseas, but it will cost a true racer somewhere critical tenths of a second. Those tenths, and more, can be made up with the insane tenacity of the Nissan’s all-wheel-drive system. It’s simply impossible to upset the car without resorting to come-and-show-me stupidity. Full-throttle before the midcorner? Happy to do it! Allow me to cut torque, grind the outside wheel, then throw power to the back while you flail away at the helm!

The same shifter motion takes the transmission in and out of automatic mode, but it doesn’t really matter. Look for the “A” or the “M” on the retro-charming dashboard gear indicator. Even in manual mode, the GT-R will sneak gearchanges in on you. It won’t let you sit at a light in fourth gear, and if you floor it from idle in fifth there will be a quick, helpful downshift before the boost hits and catapults you into Slovenia.

I’d expected the bigger turbos, fuel injectors, and ECU tuning to kill fuel economy, but the GT-R recorded a rolling 30.5mpg doing a cruise-controlled 67mph on I-71. Pull the left-side paddle three times, grab third, and floor the throttle. There will be a cloud of smoke behind you as the computer dumps fuel to keep up with the boost. This is Hayabusa-style pull, minus the aerodynamic difficulties faced by a sportbike in triple digits. When you finally cut throttle, five-foot flames will burst from the titanium exhaust, scorching the bumper and terrifying any traffic that wasn’t already paralyzed by the wake-creating discrepancy in speed between you and everybody else.

This, then, is the classic “ten-second car” of Fast and Furious fame. It generates well over 1G of accelerative force (according to the helpful dashboard display) and makes any back-road pass child’s play. Nothing can catch you, nothing can touch you. With the Toyo R888 tires fitted by Switzer’s more aggressive customers, you can even eviscerate Miatas in the midcorner before lighting their windshields with flame and disappearing from view like the Millennium Freaking Falcon. Over a standing mile, it will destroy the Ruf Yellowbird, and around a road course it can toy with NASA American Iron racers.

I stepped out of the GT-R and back into my Boxster. It felt like a toy; light, insubstantial, easy to steer, easy-riding, quiet, cheerful. And slow. Oh, how slow. I now understand why recovered heroin addicts still yearn for the needle. Give me that ultimate power. Give me the hornet buzz and the instant shift. And damn everything else.

Disclosure: The question I am asked most often by readers, after “Who the **** do you think you are?” is “What do you do for a living?” Does it really matter? Isn’t it enough that I am passionate about cars and discussing them with you, the reader? Does it matter if I’m a janitor (which I’ve been) or a hereditary Saxon Baron? In this case, however, I am forced to tell you, because there’s an ethical issue at stake. I am currently employed in a sales capacity by Switzer Performance in Oberlin, Ohio. For that reason, I’m not totally impartial about this car, any more than the guys from AutoWeek would be impartial about the Mercedes SLS after being all but fluffed by Mercedes-Benz PR people during the Chicago Auto Show.

Oh, and thanks to my son, JCB III, for being the model driver!