Nissan GT-R 50th Anniversary

Godzilla refines its road manners

GODZILLA IS getting on a bit. And as Nissan blows out the birthday candles on 50 years of the GT-R nameplate, it’s celebrating a generation that has been on sale for 12 of those years with a special edition.

Fittingly, it’s called the 50th Anniversary. Ours is Bayside Wangan Blue, a nod to the Tokyo freeway that street racers make their own Monza, and it comes with some stripes, special badging and a unique interior colour called Twilight Grey. Everything else that is new gets shared with the standard MY20 GT-R.

On the face of it, not much has changed. You could say Nissan’s hand has been forced by the limits of the current car. For instance, its 3.8-litre twin-turbo V6 has lifted outputs by only 2kW and 1Nm to avoid tempting its conrods and injectors into failure.

With a total of 421kW and 633Nm, whatever headroom is left in the engine has been saved for the incoming Nismo version. Grunt is managed by the same six-speed dual-clutch transaxle that can blast half of available torque to the front wheels. The ’box also scores revised mapping in R mode.