Julian's New Car - Part 1 - Goodbye GT-R

The steering wheel wriggles in my grasp as the front tyres follow every longitudinal mark in the urban bitumen; constant steering corrections are required to maintain anything like a straight line. The ride is noisy and uncomfortable: the aftermarket plastic bushes in the front A-arms squeak at every bump, and the car on its otherwise standard suspension jolts sharply upwards over every minor road imperfection. I peer into the rear vision mirror, trying to see the following traffic past the wing that almost completely obscures the other cars. My lower back hurts from the seat's lack of lumbar support, and the wind noise - even at just 60 km/h - whistles around the leading edge of the A pillars. The gearbox whines, and every on/off application of throttle is accompanied by the rear diff moan. This car is no fun; this is literally a pain....

A day later:

The change from fourth to fifth occurs at 220 km/h, the road streaming towards me like a big screen TV with the VCR set on fast forward. I keep my boot planted, the car screaming along the country road. The bumps have grown as the road has shrunk in width; thank God I am in the only car that I have ever driven that aerodynamically becomes more stable the faster that you go. A glance flashed down at the speedo - 240 km/h - and then eyes go back to the road. I can hear the superb DOHC twin turbo six winding ever higher; this time the glance is darted down at the intake air temp gauge. The green LEDs show just 10 degrees above ambient: that fantastic Nissan intercooler! The needle keeps moving clockwise....250, 255, then 260! Two hundred and sixty kilometres an hour - 161 mph - in this glorious, glorious car....

My Nissan Skyline GT-R. The car that can be so rewarding to drive... and also so utterly underwhelming. The car that demands that you drive like a lunatic to enjoy its fabulous side, making you put up with its manifest disadvantages the 99 per cent of the time when sanity prevails. My Skyline GT-R... the car that yesterday I traded in on another car...

The Getting of Wisdom

When does the law of diminishing returns start to bear, when the expenditure of money no longer matches the rewards generated? That depends on the amount of money that you have available, what you term sufficient reward - and the car in which you gain it. After years of reading about how wonderful the Skyline GT-R was, I couldn't wait to get my bum into one. And I found probably the newest 1991 Australian-delivered R32 Skyline GT-R in the world - it had just 3500 kilometres on the clock. Sold by Nissan Australia for A$110,000 and 7 years later for sale at A$80,000.

Leasing the car was j-u-s-t within my budget; well it was when I considered how fabulous the rewards would be! Basically, I was prepared to pull just about any financial sleight-of-hand necessary to get the car; so what if my house roof leaked a little, if the carpet needed renewing.... This was a Skyline GT-R... a car which I believed to be the best in the world.... My initial disappointment with the car's handling (and the brilliant fix that was developed) you can read about at "Godzilla Tamed", but what was the car like once that problem was overcome? Or, to put it another way, what was the car good for, exactly? After driving the car for two years and 50,000km I can tell you what it's good for.

Not for normal daily use (can't leave it parked in a shopping centre/cinema/restaurant carpark - dings in the alloy front panels, stolen/vandalised probably within minutes); not for commuting (poor ride, tramlining, noisy gearbox/diff); not for a relaxing country drive (no cruise control, harsh ride, wind noise); not for driving fast at night (woeful headlights - and who's ever seen a GT-R with huge Hellas?); not for one of my recreational loves - camping (great joke, that - GT-R at an outback campsite) - er, what for then, exactly?

GT-R Handling My coverage two years ago in magazine articles of my disappointment with the Skyline's handling still creates discussion today. Basically, the standard R32 GT-R behaves as a rear wheel drive car until massive tyre slippage is occurring, whereupon torque is fed to the front wheels. This makes the car handle like a RWD; power oversteer is available whenever you want. I don't think that a four wheel drive car should handle in that way - to me, it's being macho for the sake of bystanders and to the detriment of safety. In Australia (the only country outside of Japan where Nissan sold the car) contemporary magazine reviews praised the car's handling as being wonderful - it even won magazine comparisons aimed at finding the best-handling car in Australia. Obviously I don't agree, although with the fitment of a good torque split controller the low-speed handling becomes outstanding (it's brilliant at high speed, even in standard form). The most accurate review that I have ever read of the GT-R handling (this time of an R33 V-Spec) was in UK magazine Performance Car. They compared the GT-R with the Audi Quattro 20V, Ford Escort RS Cosworth, Lancia Delta Integrale Evo, and Subaru Impreza WRX. The comparison was made on real, mostly wet roads (as opposed to a racetrack), and said of the GT-R when comparing it with the WRX: "On unfamiliar, give and take roads, in wet weather, the Skyline can be unnerving, especially if you attempt to drive it as you would, say, the Impreza. In the Subaru, all your concentration is focused on judging the turn-in speed correctly. Once you know the front end has bitten, you can pretty much relax. In the Skyline, not only do you have to judge your turn-in speed, you also have to be careful applying power on the exit as it will readily snap into oversteer." After 50,000 kilometres of driving a GT-R, I think that sums it up beautifully - it is not a relaxing car to drive fast around corners; you have to be on top of it at all times. And that statement simply does not apply to some other cars that - on public roads - are just as quick as the GT-R through the twisties.... Julian Edgar

Try: cruising the cappuccino strip (cheers, pointing people, dribbling wankers trying to talk through your closed windows - bit embarrassing, really); full-on traffic light drags (sad when you launch at the required five grand and the other person dawdles off, though); really fast country drives (like 150 km/h+ - pity about the cops); exiting roundabouts in a four wheel drift with a touch of oversteer dialled-in with the torque split controller (but remember that you're then driving hard enough that if someone cuts you off, you're rooted); posing (but the charm wears off in minutes, see above re wankers) - er, not much here either, is there?

All of this could be forgiven if there was no other car that could touch its real-world performance for the price. No, I'm not talking the gospel according to performance magazines - where tiny increments in 0-100 and standing quarter times are apparently of earth-shattering importance - but in driving reality, where the difference between 0-100 in 6.5 and 5.5 seconds really counts for little: both are simply damn quick. In the real world, remember. What, don't believe me?

Well, consider overtaking. That's a time when more power definitely equals better: where it really counts. But if you're running an overtaking manoeuvre where a few tenths of a second make a difference, you're doing a pretty risky passing move, aren't you? And no, it's not the same as saying "Well, in that case, a bog-stock VN Commodore is as safe when passing as a Skyline GT-R". Any car doing six-point-something 0-100's (with commensurate in-gears performance) is going to be safe on the open road. Or maybe you're talking a traffic light grands prix? Any good turbo rotary will be faster than the GT-R, as will any well-developed V8. Well then, maybe its driving performance on a tight, twisty road? I'd take the current 6-speed Mazda MX5 myself - and I've driven the MX5 extensively. After a while "But it's a GT-R" (said in a hushed and reverent tone) starts to wear pretty thin....

Of course the GT-R has some good points; fantastic ones, actually. That engine. Is there a Six anywhere in the world that has a wider spread of torque, a powerband that realistically extends from 1100 to 8000 rpm? Where the revs are achieved so smoothly that it takes months to realise that one key to the car's response is its low, low gearing? Another plus: the GT-R's ability to put high speed corners behind you with utter precision and sheer pace. Where you can be exiting a corner at 150 km/h with an ever-so-slight tail-out attitude that is just so bloody good that you feel goose pimples rise all over your arms. Where - with my car's adjustable on-dash torque split controller - you can have in low speed corners anything from dramatic understeer to dramatic oversteer to perfectly neutral, all at the turn of the knob.

But how often can you enjoy all of those to the max? I made it a point to redline the car at least once every one of the 745 days that I drove the GT-R; but what do you do after that?

The Finances

A lease taken out over 4 years with a 40 per cent residual. So what's that mean in plain English? It means that you can drive a car that is more expensive than you can really afford! How so? Well, the GT-R lease was structured so that I paid $1217.74 every month for 4 years. At the end of the 4 years, a residual - final payment, if you like - of $30,000 would remain. Leases are calculated on the basis of average vehicle depreciation, with the residual supposed to match the car's value after that period - you sell the car to pay off the residual. And that's okay because prestige vehicles tend to hold their value pretty well. But not when direct Japanese imports are being sold at two-thirds the value of locally delivered cars!!

Just two years into the lease, the availability of Japanese import cars had dropped the value of my car from a paid A$75,000 to A$40,000. That's a 47 per cent drop in 24 months. Factor-in sharply decreasing prices for the Japanese import cars (where a Pulsar GtiR has dropped from A$35,000 to A$20,000 in a few years) and realistically at the end of the lease (in another 2 years' time) a GT-R - even an Australian delivered car - will probably be worth fifteen or twenty thousand dollars. Sound ludicrous - it isn't. Even now, importers are able to get R32 GT-R's onto Australian soil - import duties, etc paid - for low twenties.... So that would leave me with a A$30,000 residual payment at the end of the lease - and a car worth maybe A$15,000. Even after selling the car, I'd still need to take out a loan for perhaps A$15,000 to pay for the car I would no longer have. Leases don't work well when the value of a car declines in an unexpected way!

Incidentally, some people ask if I am bitter about the Japanese import car market - after all, it's personally cost me heaps. The answer is 'no', but I do think that importers should be forced through legislation to support their products for (say) ten years, with parts and service. That would weed out the backyarders PDQ. And if you think that I was pretty stupid paying A$75,000 for a car where direct Japanese imports were certain to dramatically reduce its value, consider the 2-door Subaru Impreza STi WRXs recently imported by Subaru Australia. Exactly the same situation exists with these cars - seen as collectors' items today and changing hands at well over the list price; tomorrow competing with the same cars imported by dealers directly from Japan and available for A$20,000 or A$25,000.....

So every day that I kept the GT-R, I saw its value declining and the amount of money that I would need to find at the end of the lease period increasing. That, and my feelings on the usefulness of the car to normal day to day living, meant there was only going to be one outcome...

Next week: Selecting a new car.

Julian's New Car Part 2 - From Audi to Honda
Julian's New Car Part 3 - The Audi S4

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