The sky is perfect, cobalt and hopeful in that Californian way. We’re set up in the high desert near Lancaster, overlooking the arid basin that holds Willow Springs Raceway in its embrace.
"Chuck Yeager flew here," I say to nobody in particular, scanning the horizon where men in winged cans once stabbed against the impossible.
Then my ears perk up. A trail of exhaust notes doppler up the hill, something rocketing our way. They arrive in a neat line, hunkered against the ground, four impossibly perfect examples of the legendary Nissan Skyline GT-R.
Sure, others wore the Skyline GT-R badge, but none matter to us as much as these: R32, R33, R34, and R35. The three earliest cars—generations R32 through R34—were lent by our gracious friends at Toprank Importers, the first and last word in owning an old GT-R. If this story sends you looking for a GT-R, don't look anywhere else.
Toprank sales director Brian Jannusch and his band of grinning GT-R zealots assure us their cars are made of virgin stuff. None have more than 30,000 kilometers on the clock. Yet all have been sorted from bottom to top, not an ounce of crumbling suspension bushing between them.
The R35, built from 2008 through this model year, was brought by Micheal Wilhelmi, a track day instructor with smooth hands behind the wheel and a wry quiet humor in the paddock.
So what’s the point?
We could call this a buyer’s guide; The earliest R34s are finally 25 years old, and thus legal to import to the US. That means every GT-R present is on Americans’ menu, and after decades of pent-up longing, you’ll want to know exactly which one is best.
But mostly this is an exercise in euphoria.
No Japanese badge has stoked American desire quite like the "Skyline GT-R." Think Calsonic, Super Street, Gran Turismo, your desktop background, and the Fast franchise. For a generation who fell hard for Japanese cars in the 80s, 90s and 2000s, Godzilla still reigns king. Why not celebrate?
Nissan Skyline R32 GT-R (1989-1994): Pixelated Immortality
Whatever you think of the “Godzilla” moniker these days (Cheezy? Outdated? Cliched? Apropos?), the towering myth of the thing began here.
Ironic then, because at arm’s length, the R32 feels impossibly compact. It’s the smallest GT-R at the test, both physically and visually, made only of smooth lines and taut surfaces. Compared to the sea of inlets and aero creases covering the later cars, with their yawning bumper cutouts and coiled-haunch fenders, the R32 feels quaint.
So too does its cabin. It’s a tidy organized space made of monotone fabrics and broad stripes of plastic. There’s not a trace of luxury pretension, despite a sales price of $65,000 modern American dollars when the R32 was new. A view over the R32’s interior tells you this is a simple but capable car. An essential tool.
The infamous RB26DETT engine sits central to that ethos.
RB26DETT debuted in this Skyline. Its name is a lengthy acronym, the first letters “RB” describing two guiding principles, “Response” and “Balance,” the letters sat ahead of the gritty details, those being 2.6 liters of displacement, Dual overhead cams, Electronic ignition control, and Twin Turbos.
The engine’s cast-iron block pairs to a 24-valve aluminum head. In period, Nissan claimed this oversquare inline-six put down 276 horses at 6,800 rpm, with 260 pound-feet lower down. Those figures were merely a wink. Those 276 horses galloped well beyond 300, according to dyno testing. Most GT-R owners know a simple tune on a stock engine is good for 400. Who could resist?
But what those thousand-horse clickbait builds don’t explain is just how smooth a stock RB is. From idle to redline, power feeds in like your right foot opens a honey tap.
The RB26DETT is an elegant thing, smoother than any BMW or Jaguar inline-six of the era. Nissan’s masterwork produces less valvetrain racket or harsh vibrations than its Euro contemporaries. At idle, if you set an Evian on the R32’s hood, the water level stays flat as an anvil. Should you consider the end-of-line Jag XK or Bimmer Big Sixes engineering zeniths, drive an RB and have your mind blown.
It’s a revelation borne of a single straightaway. The pit lane at Willow’s Horse Thief Mile—our GT-R test bed—leads directly onto a sweeping uphill right-hander at the base of a quarter-mile asphalt staircase. The first rising corner tests low-end grunt as the GT-R nudges past a dusty potholed apex.
Patience, patience, patience… the corner begs, as the R32’s left-front sets against the pavement before you unwind the steering, hammering out to a wide corner exit. Then the road noses steeply uphill until you’re angled like artillery at the Somme. As you wind toward the straightaway’s hairpin terminus, top end thrust is paramount, pure uphill locomotion.
This RB delivers less torque than you expect, but far more horsepower up top. Nineties turbos set their precedent as dimwitted things, rough beasts that take ages to roost from slumber.
Not the case here.
These snails are eager to boogie, washing their song through the cabin in whistling octaves. Without the two-turbo soundtrack, however, you’d swear this was a naturally aspirated mill. The way this ‘six swings up from low revs through redline, saving its punch for the top of the tach but never dragging down low; It feels like an Eighties Bavarian.
Horse Thief’s dusty corners throw curveball after curveball at the R32, but it never misses. This is a pliant, chatty little chassis, friendly in the way old sports cars used to be.
In corners where the R32’s nose washes away from the sandy apex, a stab at the throttle produces a polite little sashay from the wheelbase, rotating the GT-R a smidge before you’re aimed true again, back deep into the throttle.
That adjustability is another surprise. So few all-wheel-drive cars have a front end this playful and talkative; Only Mitsubishi’s Evo springs to mind. Even fewer AWD cars respond to minute throttle inputs with such eagerness.
There’s great steering feel, too, likely down to that old-school recipe of narrow tread widths, gobs of sidewall, excellent steering and suspension geometries, and low curb weight, among other factors.
The R32 GT-R’s steering wheel nibbles at your fingertips when its front tires stray only millimeters from the rubbered-in sections of the track toward the sandy ragged chunky asphalt, communicating a need for braking or throttle adjustments fractions of a second before you’d otherwise think to feed them in.
Huge audible thwacks ring through the cabin over a pair of expansion joints heading into the track’s final corner complex, but the R32’s chassis irons out the impact, isolating the suspension moment from laying a hiding your backside, even if your ears take one.
That contrast between the crude cabin and sublime driving dynamics defines the R32. It’s just a pleasant little car, friendly and talkative, five dimensions removed from the expectations set by the GT-R’s giant-slayer reputation.
Of course, it was the racing R32s—not the road cars—that stole fire from the old Gods, rising on turbocharged wings to create a mythology that rules our expectations of the GT-R badge. Now it’s impossible to separate our visions of the flame-spitting Calsonic car from this R32’s tidy flanks, to sift reality from the GT-R’s pixelated immortality.
This is no flamethrower. Instead, the R32 is one for the driving purists. Godzilla or not, this GT-R is a legend in its own right.
Nissan Skyline R33 GT-R (1995-1998): A Higher Middle Ground
If it’s possible for the best-looking sibling to also be the red-headed stepchild, you’re looking at it. The R33 feels trapped between generations, operating in a visual middle ground between the cutesy R32 and that hypersonic switchblade on wheels, the R34. It’s the same from a performance standpoint. So too with interior quality and handling.
For one reason or another, that’s relegated the R33 to middle-child status, or whatever additional family-based cliche you’d use to describe an excellent car with a PR problem.
What a shame. By stretching the wheelbase and adjusting the exterior proportions a touch, the R33 isn’t just longer and wider than the R32, it’s far better looking. Smoothed-over, refined, and resolved compared to the busy-looking R34, this is the visual sweet spot of the GT-R range.
If it’s possible for the best-looking sibling to also be the red-headed stepchild, you’re looking at it.
The early Skylines were all built in right-hand drive only. Even after a stint in the first GT-R, it takes a second for your brain to progress through the right series of motions, pushing the shift knob out and forward to hit first gear. At first, this feels about as graceful as stumbling toward the bathroom at 3:00 AM. But once you’ve found first, and clicked from second to third to fourth a few times, these clumsy staccato shifts fall into a Samba’s easy rhythm.
This transmission makes it all so effortless.
It’s a notchy precise five-speed called FSR30A, a revised version of Nissan’s ubiquitous performance transmission found in a half-dozen other models. In this form, the FSR30 is one of the more affirmative and easy-to-use ‘boxes I’ve ever hustled. Just insanely good. Notchy enough to confirm a successful gear change within milliseconds. but never stubborn when you’re working it quickly between the gates.
Unlike freshman prom night, the FSR30A never begs the question, Is it in?!
Who would have imagined the gearbox would come in for rave reviews? As Motor1’s resident gearbox knob—er, snob, color me impressed.
A dinky little Nissan key lights the engine.
The turbocharged 2.6-liter RB26 surges for a second then falls into a tidy quiet idle. A prod at the “loud” pedal produces no such racket, just a glass-smooth handful of revs and a sewing machine’s tidy march from the valvetrain.
Rolling out of pit lane, up the sweeper, and again onto that mile-high straight, you expect rage to match the R33’s athletic looks. Then you stomp the throttle and… just let the serene sense of aaaaaaahhhh wash over you. Here again, the engine’s polite as afternoon tea. Burlier than the R32’s mill, but peaky smooth all the same.
Except there’s just fifteen percent more GT-R in the R33. More boost, more power, less drag, less lift, more torque, more tire, more spring, more grip, more rigidity, and more immediate response.
For example, Nissan engineers worked in a touch of differential preload into R33, so the R32’s delightfully responsive rear end feels a smidge sharper during throttle takeup and corner entry in the R33. A thicker floorpan improved torsional strength and a relocated battery improved weight balance.
Those minute refinements abound. In some cases they were mechanical. In others, a simple choice of bushing material edges the R33’s character that little bit more-serious. These tweaks worked; the GT-R cognoscenti cite the R33 lapping the Nurburgring 20 seconds faster than the R32.
I’ve driven six-figure, 650-horse versions of this R33 and now wheeled a piece of virgin stock. Whether tuned or tame, the R33 fully embodies the GT-R ethos: technology in the service of all-out speed, but never at the expense of its driver’s satisfaction.
What more could you want?
Nissan Skyline R34 GT-R (1999-2002): The Legend
From the second you slump into the R34 Nissan GT-R, you simply can’t crawl out of its legend. For anyone about my age—that’s to say, both school-aged and hormonally imbalanced when The Fast and the Furious hit theaters—this is the GT-R. Nothing that came before or after really matters.
Here it is, resplendent in Bayside Blue, just like you dreamed. It’s 2Fast. It’s Gran Turismo. It’s Godzilla. It’s everything.
Among the group, this R34 feels the most like a precision instrument, a 300-horse hi-beat wristwatch on wheels. The little advantages and improvements that carried from R32 to R33 continued with the R34’s development, furthering its performance credentials but also the seriousness with which this GT-R handles business.
Of course, there are the looks too, massaged to accommodate all those little go-fast tweaks; Bigger brakes beget bigger wheels which beget bigger tires. And so on. The R34’s fenders and bodywork swelled further as a result, leaning into that turn-of-the-millenium tuner chic. That means vents and bulges and creases wherever they’d fit on the R34’s sheet metal.
According to the expert GT-R restorers at Garage Yoshida, Nissan ran low on funds during this car’s development. That means the R34 isn’t the most stoutly built GT-R (old worn-out stampings weren’t replaced between the R33 and R34, so fit and finish suffered, Yoshida-san says), but it is the most-advanced. It’s also incredibly well-refined.
Instead of swapping out the RB26 as initially proposed (GASP!), Nissan elected to improve it. That means 2.6 liters of displacement (2.8 in Z-Tune guise) producing the same claimed horsepower figure, but equipped with new ceramic ball bearing turbos for snappy throttle pick-up, linked to a new Getrag 6-speed manual, and routing through a revised all-wheel drive system. The tweaked powertrain muscles around a curb weight just above 3,400 pounds.
The myriad changes translate to a GT-R that feels the most stout, despite the cost cutting baked into its bones. There’s a delicate perfection to every input, from the steering weight to the shift action. The weight of the clutch pedal picks up just so, the brakes bite in a perfect way, and every other control in the cabin has an appropriate heft to it. Every little driver-centric detail edges that much closer to perfection with the R34. Here’s the case for refinement over redefinition.
Heading up Horse Thief’s canted back straight, the R34 feels markedly faster than its older siblings. Also more serious, more like an endurance racer, more like a piece of go-fast equipment than a Sunday driver. None of the other GT-Rs put me in that same head space. The view over an R34’s hood should be framed by the slot inside a helmet. This cabin demands carbon buckets and a HANS on your shoulders.
Here—finally—the GT-R meets our outsize expectations.
Turbo whoosh is exaggerated in the cabin, louder than ever and ever-present, a tidal wave of zing. Whatever the true horsepower figures are between these three early cars, one thing is certain, the R34 is far faster down a straightaway and it’ll leave the others for dead through corners.
There’s less pitch under braking in the R34, with less roll during the earliest phase of corner entry. Instead, it lays flat and confident, still with that knifelike front end, the rear-biased all-wheel drive eager to strut into a two-wheeled slide toward every corner exit.
If the R32 is the GT-R in its most charming form, the R33 is an agreeable middle ground, then the R34 is this formula at its absolute best.
Believe the hype. This is Godzilla.
Nissan R35 GT-R (2009-2024): Godzilla, Redefined
It’s a rocket. Leaping, bounding, sprinting up Horse Thief’s back straight like some unchained thing with blood on its teeth. In mere corners, the R35 GT-R sets itself apart from its now-distant ancestors.
As large as the gap from R32 to R34 feels, the R35 triples the distance between itself and its predecessors. Maybe it even quadruples it.
What Nissan accomplished with this car is astounding. It’s only fully appreciated in hindsight, but especially within the present company. Whatever we think the GT-R badge means anymore, we owe that to the R35. The others are merely antiques by comparison.
As large as the gap from R32 to R34 feels, the R35 triples the distance between itself and its predecessors. Maybe it even quadruples it.
That sounds impossibly hyperbolic, even disrespectful, but let’s double down: The R35 changed performance cars forever. It placed on-paper performance at the fore and pursued that aim ruthlessly, leveraging power, tire, computing, weight, and all-wheel drive complexity in a way the earlier cars simply did not.
If you’re dubious about the R35’s place in history, take a look at how any modern Performance EV goes about the business of harnessing power and corralling mass. This is page one in the playbook.
Except, unlike every loafing graceless go-fast EV, the R35 GT-R feels so… analog. You feel the million ways the R35 shifts power on corner exit, allowing no hint of wheel slip or driveline hesitation. There’s never a pause. Instead, you get the sense the R35 GT-R’s systems are working so quickly, you’re never held back; Only that the most optimal outcome in every corner has been achieved.
Among the four gathered cars, only R35 demands your immediate attention as you ease out of pit lane and hammer up Horse Thief’s first corner complex. Of course, now you’re sitting on the car’s left side, confronted suddenly with a hand freed of shifting duties and a pair of paddles perched behind the steering wheel.
Then you hit that uphill straight.
The VR38DETT engine unloads a barrage here. Like its progenitors, two turbos hang from the VR. Except these six cylinders are arranged in a vee, offering better weight distribution to alleviate one of the old GT-Rs’ Achilles heels.
Into this track’s tightest hairpin, you feel the R35’s extra heft (approaching 4,000 lbs in the current model year) as you shoulder the steering wheel at the apex. But there’s not an inch of push, even if you’re too late unloading the brake pedal. Nor is there a big hairy oversteer moment.
The R35 GT-R simply goes. It smooths mistakes into efficiencies, but doesn’t patronize its driver with numbness or a lack of immediacy. This car’s cabin, noise isolation, interior quality, and comfort are a leap forward from the GT-Rs which came before.
All that feels secondary to the way it goes down the road with such ruthless attitude.
Time will be kind to this car, which felt Terminator cold upon its 2008 debut, but has in the fullness of time, both conquered everything which came before it and set the formula which performance EVs would use to rewrite our concept of going fast. In that way, the R35 GT-R marks the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end.
Chuck Yaeger flew here. So too did the R35 GT-R.
The GT-R Shootout Participation Trophy Award
In the paddock, radiators tick over. The sun gets low, flirting with the rim of the mountains. Their peaks become only a jagged dark stabs against the horizon and the amber sky lights up like gold dust in the R34’s metallic paint.
We park the GT-Rs side by side for a final shot, everyone antsy for post-shoot margaritas, but also longing for stillness all the same. The question rises from the ether as we scratch our chins.
“Which one would you take?”
Photographer Robin Trajano circles the pack of GT-Rs with his lens. They’re lined up side to side and nose to tail for one final epic shot of the cars’ iconic tail lights.
We get to talking.
The R32 is for purists. No doubt. It’s the most retro and connected. For drivers like me who value involvement—and will sacrifice lap times to have it—the R32 Skyline GT-R provides a conversation through every available input. From the gearbox’s notchy perfection to the steering wheel’s chatter to the way chassis feedback transmits up your spine, this GT-R offers the most authentic connection to its driver. The car’s modest cabin and tail-happy mechanical honesty feel refreshing in modern context.
Money no object, hand to God, pinky swear it, I’ll have the R32, thank you.
But I suspect most readers of this site would be happier in an R33. It moves the GT-R formula forward, bridging the gap from a polite purity to the R34 GT-R’s outsized infamy. If you squint, the two cars even look the same.
R33 is the daily driver’s choice, modern enough to commute in without concessions, a touch more civilized than the R32, but not a full-blown event like the R34, in case you’d rather fill your tank in peace than invite a crowd of gawking dorks (like myself) to drool on your car.
It’s the best-looking GT-R too; Not the most-important factor, but certainly not the least. Finally, an incredible example of an R33 is often attached to a far more-agreeable price than even the rattiest R34 GT-R. Here’s your perfect all-rounder, precious because it’s a GT-R, but not so precious you can’t drive its wheels off.
For so many of us, however, the only answer is R34. It’s in the blood.
More often the R34 lined our bedroom walls, graced the pages of our magazines, leapt from our PlayStations, and latched onto our hearts. It even drives better than you imagined it would, a real feat given the mountain of hype you brush aside to jump in the R34’s driver seat.
This is a relentless machine of the highest order, a gorgeous thing to whip ‘round a racetrack and a blank canvas for tuning unlike any other. It’s a stone-cold blue-chip classic. If you’ve got the scratch to scratch the itch, get in while you still can.
Finally, if you absolutely must decimate every 911 GT3 at your local track day—or simply want the only GT-R with a USB input—there’s the R35. It stomps out any notion of competition among its contemporaries, let alone its siblings. Fifteen years on from its debut as the ultimate supercar slayer, it’s amazing how fast the R35 blitzes a race track. More striking: how feelsome and engaging the R35 is, how well it’s tuned to deliver feedback to the driver.
From its helm, you’re confident enough to flat-foot every triple-digit sweeper, assured you’ll reach corner exit another few car lengths closer to your prey, feeling the car working underneath you the entire way, but not necessarily commanding every granular input.
There’s not a loser in the bunch. Instead, this bloodline sports a breadth of talents rolled into a single badge with the three most-powerful letters in the automotive universe: GT-R.
