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| Magazine Features - Nissan Skyline GT-R - Six of the beast |
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This lightweight Nissan Silvia S14 has a 500bhp Skyline GT-R six cylinder turbo lump under the bonnet. Result - a beast with oversteer by the armful.
Featured in Japanese Performance Magazine.
(May 2006) |
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| Magazine Feature |
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No question, the Nissan Skyline GT-R is ‘the daddy' of the Japanese performance car scene. These days, there are excellent Evos, sorted Supras and iconic Imprezas that can challenge the best GT-Rs – but nothing has quite the same punch or presence. With its famously tuneable 2.6-litre twin-turbo RB26 DETT engine and intelligent 4WD system at its core, most people accept that Nissan's GT-R rules the roost.
But there's one fly in the ointment. The R34 GT-R weighs in at a lardy 1560kg, which means that its power-to-weight ratio stinks in standard tune (just 180bhp per ton). It's a fat old sod, so it's just as well that you can extract huge horsepower from it to make a genuinely quick car. Alternatively, you have to send it on a serious weight-saving programme.
But, instead of spending a small fortune buying, speccing up and building a lightweight, forged, monster-power GT-R, there's a novel alternative. One ingenious enthusiast has simply dropped the GT-R's twin-turbo, 2.6-litre RB26 DETT engine into the lighter shell of Nissan's 1250kg Silvia S14. Sure, it doesn't have a Skyline badge, but what it does offer is a vastly improved power-to-weight ratio. Added to that, there is less transmission power loss, because the Silvia is rear-wheel drive, not four-wheel drive. |
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If you're thinking that this is a perfect recipe for a serious sideways machine, you're absolutely right. It's ideal for drifting. One intelligent, slightly possessed, opposite-lock-loving enthusiast in Japan has built this car with just that in mind. Fed up with the relatively limited tuning potential of the Silvia's 2.0-litre, four-cylinder, singleturbo SR20DET Nissan lump, our Japanese engineer dumped the four-pot in favour of Nissan's flagship twin-turbo six-cylinder RB26 DETT. A fine idea, if you ask us!
Now, thanks to the enthusiast-driven crew at Auto Import Solutions, this Skyline-powered S14 beast from the East has landed on the shores of our fair isle. This is the first Skyline-powered S14 in the UK – and one of only a handful in the world.
AIS bosses Paul Westwell and Paul Greenhalgh spotted this madly-modified Silvia on one of their many late-night auction trawls – and both of their jaws simultaneously dropped to the floor. ‘It's not every day you come across a car like this,' understates Paul G, ‘so we told our buyers out there we just had to have it, whatever the cost. There was no way that we were going to let this one slip through the net.' |
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