Flash forward to 2022 and Nissan has announced an actual Z race car that customers can buy. Say hello to the Nissan Z GT4, the latest sports car racing contender from Japan. Unlike the Fairlady Z432R, the Z GT4 won’t be road legal, but that doesn’t matter considering how serious this effort is. To craft the Z GT4, Nissan’s Nismo division took a standard Z and removed everything that was unnecessary. The stock wheels, the quarter windows, the interior, the lot. Once everything extraneous was stripped away, Nismo went to town. The stock dual exhaust makes way for a single-exit cannon, the interior features a proper roll cage and a bucket seat with a halo. The suspension’s been reworked, the VR30DDTT twin-turbocharged three-liter V6 has been retuned, and a whole host of aerodynamic tweaks have been applied.
At the front, the standard car’s divisive grille has been ditched in favor of purposeful mesh to ram more air through the heat exchangers. A big splitter makes its presence known on the front valence and wraps into front wheel arch extensions, while enormous canards direct even more air. The hood now features aerodynamic external catches and two purposeful vents that should help evacuate a lot of hot engine bay air. At the back, a large rear wing with a transparent Gurney flap helps glue the Z GT4 to the track, while the requisite towing point and rain light are set nicely into the rear bumper.
From there, the Z GT4 was actually fine-tuned in the heat of battle. Two test vehicles entered the 2022 Fuji Super TEC 24 Hours Race, with car number 244 finishing in the overall top ten after a virtually trouble-free 707 laps of the legendary circuit. From there, Z GT4 development continued in multiple Super Taiku events, meaning this GT4 car has racing chops before it’s even gone on sale. Expect full specifications and pricing for the Nissan Z GT4 to be announced at the SEMA show in Las Vegas sometime between Nov. 1 and Nov. 4. Customer deliveries are said to start in the first half of 2023, which means it won’t be long until the Nissan Z GT4 is dicing it up with Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 Clubsports and Toyota GR Supra GT4s. [Ed note: All I want to do is get one of these, paint it Sharp Racing red-white-and-blue, and toss good ol’ #33 on it and go racing in IMSA!] All photos courtesy of Nissan They sure have changed through the decades but I dare you to find another car that has stuck so closely to its original design language throughout it’s modernization than the Z. I’ll bet a time traveling aficionado from 1969 could take one look at this beauty 53 years later and see that it’s a still a Z. Sure. You got a couple million burning a hole in your pocket? You can guy an Acura NSX GT3 Evo22 too. No, seriously. PMC will build you the exact same car the factory team runs, starting at (checks notes) about $750k-1.1M depending on series after your mandatories. ($560k is just the chassis.) Oh, and you can only race it till the end of the 2024 season. That’s when the homologation expires. That’s about how much the Z GT4’s going to cost – at least half a million. Excluding all your spares, ancillary equipment, transponders, and mandatory support contracts. R8 LMS GT4 Evo’s are hitting the market at $200k+. Early GR Supra GT4s are $200k+. AMG GT4’s are $200k+. KTM X-Bows are $250k. Cayman GT4 Clubsport, $250k+. And every one of them will no longer be eligible for competition after 2024, if they aren’t already. That’s why they’re so cheap. They’re already used up and have little to no life left. Car dealerships are cancer and they are what is killing car culture. Not safety or environmental regs. Dealers add $50k in markups to the most desirable models = car makers complain and cut the models because “no one’s buying.” Of course fucking no one is buying. It’ll be a cold day in hell when I let a dealer steal $50k from me while adding nothing of value. “These sales numbers are awful. We can’t make these, there’s no market.” Anything to bash dealers while not having the least clue about the car. This will not be on a single dealer’s lot, ever. You cannot buy this car, whether or not you have the cash. (You do not.) This is a strictly track-only car based on a 400Z body-in-white which you cannot legally purchase, and does not have a VIN so cannot be legally registered anywhere, which Nissan absolutely will not let any dealer sell you at any price. The ONLY way you can purchase one is by becoming part of Nissan/NISMO’s customer racing program (which is NOT the NASA contingency program or even similar.) The only way you can do THAT is by signing a customer racing program agreement with Nissan Motorsports International Co., Ltd. (NISMO) in Japan. The only way NISMO will be willing to do that is if you show them that your racing team is an actual business, has sufficient sponsors and previous competition experience in an equivalent or comparable sanctioning body, and you have north of $5M in cash to spend per season not including purchase of equipment like haulers.
