Hakosuka,- The Car That Started A Growing Love Affair Way Back In 1969

The start to the GT-Rstory is a far cry from the brutal awd beasts of today, but it's arguably more revered

- Chris Thompson

FOUR DOORS, two driven wheels and a total of zero turbochargers. None of this is what we think of when someone says GT-R, but this is where it all started. The twin-turbo all-wheel drive beast we know today owes its existence to something very different.

Meet the "Hakosuka" (pronounced hako-ska) GT-R. That’s not what Nissan’s paperwork calls the first Skyline GT-R – PGC10 and KPGC10 were the model codes – but it’s become the official unofficial name of the ‘Box Skyline’. In Japanese, ‘hako’ means box and ‘suka’ is short for Sukairain, the types of mountain roads from which the car takes its name: Skyline.

The GT-R story begins in the late 1960s, at a time when Nissan had just absorbed Prince Motor Company, and when the merged engineering knowledge of the two groups was starting to pay dividends on the track. With the engineers from Prince having proven their worth by developing the R380 racecar and the previous Prince Skylines, Nissan decided that the C10 Skyline would be its next performance car project. The engine from the R380 and the body of the Skyline road car were to be the basis for a new motorsport champion.

The man credited as the driving force behind the subsequent development was Shinichiro Sakurai, an engineer with a tough work ethic. Sakurai was the type of man who would say things like “the Skyline is my alter-ego”, according to former apprentice Naganori Itou. There’s a reason many at Nissan called him ‘Mr Skyline’. Starting out as an engineer on the first Prince Skyline in the 1950s, he quickly worked his way up to become leader of the development team for the third generation, the Hakosuka. Sakurai then remained in charge of the Skyline until the R31 generation, before handing the reins over to his protege Itou.