And Here's The Eight-Second Street Car

There’s something powerful about this video. The violence of the launch. The frantic revs, the merciless shifts, the fact that the driver hits fifth gear before crossing the line. The only question is: how fast is he going?

That’s 8.61 seconds at 170 miles per hour. There are certainly faster “street legal” cars out there, such as the seven-second street class in the UK, but those aren’t really cars you could drive in traffic or with passengers. This GT-R looks stock, sounds nearly stock, and accelerates like a 747SP on a short runway.

Long-time TTAC readers will know that I briefly worked for the GT-R wizards at Switzer Performance. I asked their media assassin Jo Borras if he knew anything about this car. Turns out that Switzer was involved in the preparation of what is a sort of amazing mongrel GT-R, containing parts from a few different tuner companies. “Can you cook up a press release?” I inquired, since autojournos love rewriting press releases. He obliged:

ShepTrans’ owner John Shepherd was behind the wheel of his high-horsepower GTR yesterday, when he set a new GTR 1/4 mile record: an ET of 8.61 with a trap speed in excess of 170 mph!

Shepherd’s record run didn’t just come down to his Nissan GTR’s exotic drivetrain, however – it was also a matter of software. “We didn’t intend to set records,” explains Tym Switzer, head of Syvecs North America and its parent company, Switzer Performance. “We headed out to the track with John’s car and another customer’s Ultimate Street Edition GTR to test some of the new strategies we’ve been developing on our Syvecs SGTR ECU package for the Nissan R35 GTR. We didn’t think we’d be gunning for records and certainly didn’t think we’d be making any headlines – we didn’t even bring a camera! Everything just started clicking and we came home with a new GTR record on Shep’s car, and a new fast time validation run for one of our USE cars, which ran a 9.6 at 149 mph amazingly on 93 octane pump fuel…

…On John’s car, the Syvecs ecu served to tie together a fully-built ShepTrans driveline, an AMS turbo kit, and our Switzer/Syvecs dual-injection fuel system, as well as quite a few other vendor-supplied components to help get the job done. The car was well-prepared by John’s guys, and Boyan Radomirov (Switzer Performance/Syvecs North America’s lead tuner) deserved a great deal of the credit for the effort, as he was on hand to help John dial the car in and has spent hundreds of hours gathering data and working behind the scenes with the rest of the Syvecs team to make sure our software updates effectively improve both performance and drivability.”

Now, I know Tym Switzer personally, and I’ve never heard him string together that many words without saying “fuck” three times in said collection of words. So we’ll assume Jo is editing for content and length.

If you’ve never heard about the Switzer GT-Rs, here’s my original review of the P800. I said at the time that I’d rather have a Viper, and I’ll stand by that statement today. But when I have that Viper, and I see a GT-R like this one next to me at the stoplights, I’ll put on my turn signal, okay?