Nissan
I can't say anything else than this: Skylines are ugly!
There: I finally said it! They are f*#$ing ugly!
No seriously: I don't think they are all ugly, but I was looking at Bryan's Nissan Skyline page. He's an Aussie and in Australia the Skyline was available through Nissan, in contrary of Europe which banished the Skyline from the R30 onwards. I understood some models were manufactured in Australia as well!
Anyway, I've always been a big fan of the R30 and R31 Skylines, but these R31 examples taken from Bryan's page are hidious:
They don't even feature the round taillights!
Apparently there was also a R31 wagon/station:
And look at this R33 4 door sedan:
I mean: it's nowhere near the beauty of the R33 coupé or even the R33 GT-R!
But then again: the Skyline used to be a normal midclass car, in my opinion comparable to the BMW 5 series. And the M5 does look much better than the normal 5 series!
Source:
Bryan's Nissan Skyline page
Just found this page:
http://www.240rs.jp/
It's the restoration of the Nissan Silvia BS110 240RS I posted earlier about. All BS110 240RS rallycars originally were made by Blydenstein in the UK, so the car is not a factory produced rallycar, but they were produced on behalf of Nissan: that's why they were badged Nissan and not Datsun.
This car competed in the Hong Kong-Beijing rally in 1985, won the National Rally Championship 1988 in the UK and used in various other rallies. The car was imported into Japan from New Zealand: one of the few Japanese cars to actually be imported back to Japan! The car was restored in original state in 2005 by Green Bell Motor Co. Ltd. (Kanazawa) in Hakusan, Japan.
Start of the restoration:
And the end result:
And afterwards in action:
Action shot can also be seen in this image:
It's just like a tin can of Droste :D :D
Yesterday Auto Otaku posted an article about the Tokyo Nostalgic Car Show 2008. IMO it's majority was a Nissan fest showing mostly a lot of modified 70s Skylines.
I found this car among the pictures:
At first I couldn't really identify it and thought of a modified Celica TA63 or TA64. However the front is entirely different and the sidelights looked genuine. Then it popped in my mind that there could have been a Nissan Silvia counterpart of the TA64. Then I looked at the rear sidewindows and spotted them to be from a Silvia S11! :)
Indeed such a car did exist:
It's the FJ24 BS110 Nissan 240RS Group B World Rally Car!
The car features a FJ20ET with increased displacement up to 2340cc and it made 280HP!
Not bad for a car which was the counterpart of the Celica TA64. Also the Nissan FJ20ET Plasma engine is the counterpart of the Toyota Lasre 3T-GTE, imagine what monster the TA64 would have been if the 4T-GTE would have featured the same head as the 3T-GTE!!
More info upon the FJ20 and the BS110 RS240:
http://www.tati-motorsport.nl/public_html/?q=nl/NissanFJ20Engine
