tpeezy wrote:found a currency converter and that thing runs about $162,000.for that cash i'd rather have a lamborghini gallardo.

Sport Compact Car - May 2005 wrote:Tear that McLaren poster off your wall. And the Enzo lithograph. And the Porsche calendar. Strip the Speed Racer sheets off your twin, mama's boy. There's a new king in town. BMW likes to think it makes "the ultimate driving machine," but NISMO, even more brazenly, titled its R34 GT-R Z-tune the "ultimate road-going car in the world."

Using the quarter-mile dash as a partial indicator, NISMO might be right. It's probably the quickest. Chat room disciples, you may proceed to whip each other into a foaming, flaming frenzy. Ah, you say, what about the Enzo? Slow. The McLaren F1? Fancy pants Hyundai Excel. Saleen S7R Twin Turbo, the quickest car on the planet? Turdlike. If numbers whispered by NISMO staff in the halls of the Tokyo Auto Salon are to be believed, the Z-tune ran 0-100 meters (a little shorter than a quarter mile) in 10.06 seconds during development. That's more than 6/10 of a second faster than any production car ever tested. And this is no drag car.

NISMO is handcrafting 20 Z-tune GT-R's to mark the 20th anniversary of the birthdate of Nissan's racing arm. Ah, you argue, Nissan hasn't made the GT-R since 2003. That's true. The 20 very lucky and rich people who we want to say bad things about are actually buying used GT-R's. NISMO bought used GT-R V-Specs, each with less than 18K miles on the clock, and stripped them to bare shells.

The Z-tune is built at the NISMO facility by the same NISMO engineers who sculpt the factory racecars, using the same techniques, the same tools and the same expertise. To build an all-conquering Skyline GT-R is no challenge to NISMO engineers, but building one that is truly a street car presents a challenge: total supremacy, taking into account emissions, crash friendliness, potholes, rain, hot days and traffic.

At $170K each, the Z-tune is a tremendous bargain. In addition to it being a hand-built, obsessively finished and technologically saturated supercar, you get absolute exclusivity and rarified performance for less than the cost of the cheapest Ferrari. If Nissan's PR flacks wanted a means of reinjecting "GT-R" into our brains to build toward the upcoming launch of the R35 GT-R, they have succeeded.