I read the news yesterday and Japanese Nostalgic Car blogged about this as well: Paul Newman passed away.

Apart from many good movies he made he was also quite close to Nissan: he raced several Datsuns during the 60s and 70s and in the early 80s he even got a special edition Nissan Skyline R30 with his name on it (rebadged GT-EX) and featured the ads for them:

Another small detail: the last Skyline R30 in the ads features the Plasma FJ engine which I blogged about in May this year:
http://www.banpei.net/content/nissan-silvia-bs110-rs240-rally
Therefore it should be a Skyline RS in the ad.

I think there was no greater tribute in his life than this. ;)

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

Of course you may have spotted the LASRE acronym among several Toyota catalogues (especially the Carina catalogues) like this:

I was wondering what it actually meant and I found this description for the acronym:
LASRE: lightweight advanced super response engine

I can't imagine the 3A being a lightweight, nor a super advance response engine... But apparently it should be a lot more lightweight than the 2T featuring my car. ;)

Anyway, Lasre sounds really cool! Almost the same as Laser, which is a real 80s buzzword. Could it be that some Toyota mechanic misspelled the word "laser"??

I did some more digging and quite naturally found that Nissan used a similar acronym: PLASMA. It actually was intended as the counterpart of the LASRE lineup.

Look at that engine! Plasma was just like laser and turbo another buzzword of the early 80s! I'd expect big explosions inside that engine!!