1989 saw some of the biggest world events that changed the course of history. The Cold War had ended, the Tiananmen Square protests raged on for months, and Billy Joel’s abridged history lesson song, We Didn’t Start The Fire, was released. Okay, that last reference is a very tito one.
The idea of an everyday supercar was practically unimaginable back in the day. Sure, there was the Porsche 959, but that one cost a serious amount of money. For the most part, it was accepted that supercars were simply too compromised to ever be considered friendly to drive. But everything changed when Honda pulled the covers off the NSX.At the time, Japan had yet to produce something that can go toe to toe against Ferraris and Porsches.
It was so good and well priced to a point that BMW accused Lexus of ‘dumping’, a practice wherein a product is priced way below its real value. Not only that, Mercedes-Benz lost a huge chunk of its market share in the US, all because of LS. Not only did the Lexus LS shake up the establishment, it forced them change tactics.Japan was awash with sports coupes in the ‘80s, practically inventing the sport compact genre.
Prior to the R32, the GT-R name had been sitting idle for 16 years. So, why did Nissan bring it back? Simply put, it wanted to build a race car for Group A class touring car racing. To do that, the company needed to build 5,000 road-going versions of the car it wants to race. Not only that, the showroom version had to come with the changes made to the race car to be made eligible.