The Skyline arrived before the Turbo – literally, not figuratively, of course. The weather was fine, the road was empty and there seemed little point in hanging around for the appearance of the Porsche. So with the owner’s permission I went off for a tootle. Good word, tootle; it aptly describes the process of driving with no appetite for speed. A tootle is an exploratory outing, a systems check, a familiarization period.
Above and beyond all the other facts about the Skyline that I learned that day – most of which were hyperbolic – realizing that the Nissan requires the shortest tootling period of any fast car in my experience was perhaps the most important. Because just as we all hoped, the R35 Skyline (OK, Nissan has decreed that it must be called GT-R, so we will do so, but to enthusiasts it will always be the Skyline) is about to disrupt the comfortable world of the European super-duper-coupe in a manner that not even its precocious predecessors managed.
Great technological leaps in automotive hardware are a strange phenomenon to judge because all too often their significance is clouded by their seamless introduction into the motoring world. They are so inherently right, so good at what they set out to achieve, that their excellence becomes less obvious; it simply blends into the process of driving, so that the driver very quickly assumes that this is the way the world has always been.
The GT-R is to fast road cars what the mobile phone is to personal communication; you wonder what feckless creatures we must have been to have survived without them. This is the crux of the new GT-R; it is a new type of sports car. It is a baby Veyron.
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You climb into the GT-R via a DB9-style extending door lever. The cabin dimensions don’t justify the large exterior – this is a big, big car – but shuffled down into the leather seat and having juggled with the wheel, you can select an excellent driving position. There is no key, just an electronic fob that opens the doors and whose presence then sanctions a push on the large red starter button. That pushed, the 3799cc, twin-turbo V6 fires with no more drama than a 350Z and settles to a burbling idle that sounds very GT-R indeed.
Plonk the gearlever back to D, brush the throttle and the car tootles away from rest as the driver familiarizes himself with the surroundings. The scuttle is high, the dash voluminous and imposing with more than a hint of Ferrari 550 about its shape and detail; those air vents are a dead ringer, for starters.
You push and prod things, glide a hand over various surfaces and reach the conclusion that time, money and effort have been lavished here like no GT-R before it. You look down and see that the gear indicator in the clock set is displaying the figure ‘6’. But you only remember one gearchange.
