The Nissan Skyline GT-R is one of Japan’s most famous fast cars. It’s known for being extremely quick and for helping make “JDM” performance cars a big deal worldwide.
The Nissan GT-R is a high-performance sports car made by Nissan. The podcast connects it to racing success and explains how it became known beyond Japan. It’s mentioned because it’s a major performance model with a strong competition background.
Tightening emissions regulations means governments are requiring cars to produce less pollution, which often forces automakers to change engines, tuning, and sometimes even discontinue certain performance models. For JDM “golden era” cars, these rules were a major reason the lineup of affordable, high-revving sports cars shrank.
Person
Carlos Gone
Carlos Ghosn was a top executive at Nissan. Here, he’s mentioned because he was the one teasing that the GT-R name would keep going, even though Nissan wasn’t saying exactly how yet.
The Infiniti G37 is another U.S. version in the same family as the G35. The episode mentions it to explain how Nissan kept changing the name as the Skyline moved into the luxury market.
The Infiniti Q50 is a later model in the same U.S. luxury line that replaced the G35/G37. The episode uses it to show how the Skyline identity changed over time in America.
A platform is the underlying “bones” of a car—its basic layout and structure. Nissan’s FM platform is a common layout they used for many rear-wheel-drive cars, but the GT-R needs a different setup than that platform was built for.
“50/50 weight distribution” means the car has about the same weight on the front and back wheels. The idea is that it helps the car handle more evenly instead of feeling front-heavy or rear-heavy.
A “grey market” is when cars get imported and sold through unofficial channels, not the normal dealer network. The episode says this is how older GT-Rs ended up in places they weren’t originally meant to be sold.
Gran Turismo is a popular racing video game series. The episode credits it with making the Skyline GT-R famous to a huge number of people who might never have seen one in real life.
Car
RB26
The RB26 is a well-known Nissan engine used in older GT-Rs. The point being made is that it was great, but it had become outdated, so engineers replaced it with something newer.
VR38 DETT is Nissan’s twin-turbo V6 engine. The segment says it was built specifically for the next GT-R so it could fit the car’s layout and make strong power right away, with potential for even more later.
The Infiniti G35 is a rear-wheel-drive Nissan-related car. Here, the host says it was used as a starting point—basically stripped down—so engineers could build a stronger, more performance-focused foundation for the next big Nissan.
Structural geometry is basically the chassis’s key shapes and point locations. The host is saying these details matter because they influence how the suspension and body work together when you turn.
The floor pan is the main metal base under the seats and cabin. In this story, it’s one of the key parts engineers kept because it helps determine how the car’s structure and mounting points work.
Suspension pickup points are the spots on the car where the suspension connects to the body. Where those points are placed affects how the wheels move when you turn, which changes handling.
“Grand tour” is a style of car meant for comfortable long trips. The host is saying they removed those comfort-oriented parts to leave a performance-focused foundation.
A dual-clutch transmission uses two clutches so gear changes can happen quickly. “Rear-mounted” just means it’s positioned toward the back of the car, which can help the drivetrain layout for performance.
All-wheel drive means power goes to all four wheels. That can help the car grip the road better, especially in slippery or low-traction situations.
Term
premium midship
“Premium midship” is basically a way of saying the car’s design is aiming for a more advanced, higher-end layout with the engine positioned closer to the middle. That helps balance the car for handling.
Concept
development authority
“Development authority” here means Mizuno was given direct control over the project’s engineering decisions rather than working under the usual constraints. The segment frames this as a major organizational change that enabled a different kind of engineering process.
A clean room is a very controlled workshop environment with fewer contaminants. Keeping temperature stable helps ensure the engine is built consistently and correctly.
Lotus Engineering is a company known for helping design and refine cars, especially around handling and lightweight engineering. The segment says Nissan brought them in to help improve the prototype’s chassis.
A “badge” is the nameplate/emblem that tells you what model a car is. The segment says the R35 shouldn’t use the Skyline name because the earlier GT-Rs were marketed as Skyline cars first.
The Nissan GT-R (the R35 generation) is a very serious performance car. It’s famous for being fast in a straight line and, more importantly, for being hard to beat around race tracks.
Person
Carlos Ghosn
Carlos Ghosn was a Nissan executive. In this story, he steps up to the press and talks about where the car was tested to prove how good it is.
The Nürburgring is a well-known race track in Germany. Car makers use it to see how fast and well their cars really are, not just on simple test routes.
Person
Mizuno
Mizuno is the driver mentioned here. He keeps going back to the Nürburgring and posting faster times, which is the point of the argument in the segment.
The Corvette ZR1 is the most hardcore version of the Corvette. Here it’s mentioned because it was one of the other big-name performance cars competing for a major award.
The Lamborghini Gallardo is a high-end exotic supercar with a powerful engine. The hosts mention it to show just how much money these “halo” cars cost compared to the Japanese cars they’re talking about.
The Ferrari 430 Scuderia is a special, more track-oriented Ferrari with a strong, high-revving engine. The episode brings it up as an example of the kind of expensive “halo” car they’re comparing against.
Term
attack package
An “attack package” is a set of upgrades meant to make a car feel more aggressive and track-ready. Here, it includes things like aero and suspension changes to help it go faster on a lap.
The Toyota MR2 is a small sports car made by Toyota. It’s designed for driving fun rather than being a big family car. The podcast mentions it because it was one of the important Toyota sports cars that helped inspire a generation of fans.
The Toyota Corolla is a small, everyday car made by Toyota. It’s known for being practical and generally dependable. The podcast mentions it because Toyota also made more exciting cars, and the Corolla is part of that bigger story.
The Toyota Supra is a sports car made by Toyota. It’s built for performance—faster acceleration and more engaging driving than a typical daily car. The podcast brings it up because it’s one of the most famous Toyota performance models.
The Toyota 2000 GT is an old-school Japanese sports car that helped build Toyota’s reputation with enthusiasts. The hosts mention it to show Toyota used to make exciting cars, not just practical ones.
The Toyota Camry is a regular-size family car made by Toyota. It’s designed to be comfortable and dependable for daily driving. The podcast mentions it because it’s one of the big sellers that helped define Toyota’s reputation.
The Toyota RAV4 is a compact SUV made by Toyota. It’s built for daily driving and is known for being practical and dependable. The podcast mentions it because it’s one of Toyota’s big-selling models.
Car
2JZ engine
The 2JZ is a Toyota engine that became legendary with car fans because it can handle upgrades. Here, the host is saying new emissions rules made it expensive to keep meeting regulations, so it wasn’t worth updating.
The Toyota Celica is a sporty compact car made by Toyota. The podcast says it was discontinued because sales were dropping. It’s mentioned as part of the story of Toyota ending some of its sports models.
Carumabonare is a Japanese idea for people choosing not to care about cars anymore. In this episode, it’s used to explain why younger Japanese buyers moved away from owning cars, especially sporty ones.
The Toyota Alphard is a big, upscale minivan. The host is using it as an example of how status shifted away from sports cars and toward comfortable, spacious family vehicles.
Haruhiko Tanahashi is mentioned as someone at Toyota who noticed the global market still wanted what Japanese automakers could build. The point here is that Toyota needed to keep its identity strong for buyers outside Japan.
RPM means how fast the engine spins. Saying “9,000 rpm” is pointing to the high-speed part of the engine where the car’s sound and feel are especially noticeable.
This is talking about a car project that took about 12 years to develop. Over that time, new technology and new information can force the team to redo parts of the design.
“Bean counters” means the finance people who focus on costs and budgets. In big companies, they may question expensive projects if the return isn’t clearly proven.
A carbon fiber supercar uses lightweight carbon-fiber materials in the car’s structure. The goal is usually to make the car lighter and more rigid so it drives sharper.
This describes how the car’s frame pieces are made. Extrusions are like pushing material through a shaped tool, and castings are made by pouring metal into a mold.
Tolerances are how precisely a part has to be made. If the fit or shape is off by even a little bit, the car’s structure can behave differently than the engineers intended.
Weave patterns describe how carbon-fiber sheets are laid up (the orientation and arrangement of fibers) before curing. Because fiber direction strongly affects stiffness and strength, the weave pattern is tuned so the chassis flexes in the exact way the engineers designed.
Yamaha is a company that makes more than just motorcycles. In this story, they helped Toyota and Lexus with the LFA—first on the engine, and then by applying their precision know-how from making musical instruments.
A naturally aspirated V10 is a 10-cylinder engine that breathes normally without forced induction. It’s known for a sharp, high-revving character because the engine has to pull in air on its own.
An analog tachometer is the RPM gauge with a needle. If the engine revs change very quickly, the needle may not keep up, so the reading won’t feel accurate.
Surge tanks are parts in the intake system that help control how air moves into the engine. Here, the story says they were tuned so the intake sound coming into the cabin would be more musical and intentional.
The Lexus LFA is a special supercar from Lexus (Toyota). It has a high-revving V10 engine, and the sound is a big part of why people love it—engine noise that feels tuned and “musical,” not just loud. The episode says even reviewers who drove it all described the same standout sound.
“Intake sound” is the noise you hear from air being pulled into the engine. The episode says Toyota didn’t leave that to chance—they designed parts of the intake so the sound in the cabin would be exactly right.
Concept
proof
Here, “proof” means the LFA was built to show what Toyota could do. The hosts say it wasn’t mainly about making money—it was about proving the company’s engineering skills and learning from the project.
Akiyo Toyota is a Toyota insider whose writing is quoted in this segment. The hosts use his explanation to argue that Toyota built the LFA not to make money, but to learn and pass that knowledge to future engineers.
Issei Jingu Shikinin Sengu is a Shinto tradition where a very important shrine is rebuilt on a schedule. The episode uses it as a metaphor: the real goal is passing down the know-how to the next generation, not just keeping a building standing.
Tetsuya Tata is a Toyota chassis engineer mentioned in the story. The hosts say Toyota called him urgently in 2007, and they use his background to show how the company pulled in engineers from unexpected areas for sports-car work.
ABS stands for anti-lock braking system. It helps you keep steering control when you brake hard by stopping the wheels from locking up. The segment mentions ABS to show the engineer’s background before sports-car work.
WRC means World Rally Championship, which is a major form of rally racing. The episode mentions it to say the engineer worked on cars that had to survive and perform in tough rally conditions.
“Devil’s cycle” here means the usual car-company pattern of making each new sports car bigger, faster, and more complicated. The episode says Tata thought that assumption was wrong for the kind of fans he wanted to reach.
Term
flat box configuration
This is about how the engine is shaped and placed so the car can keep a low hood and still fit people comfortably. The episode connects it to making the car balanced and practical for a young driver.
A boxer engine is a type of engine where the cylinders sit flat and move opposite each other. It’s a design Subaru is known for, and it can help the car feel more balanced.
Rear-wheel drive means the rear wheels do most of the work to move the car. It can make the car feel different to drive than cars that send power to the front or all wheels.
A development code is an internal label engineers use while a new car is being designed. It’s like a placeholder name before the final model name is decided.
The AE86 is a famous older Toyota that became a big deal in car culture. It’s especially known because it showed up in the anime Initial D and became a symbol of affordable, fun driving.
Tsuchiya refers to Keiichi Tsuchiya, a well-known Japanese drifting and motorsport personality. In car culture, he’s strongly associated with promoting the AE86 and mountain-pass racing imagery popularized by Initial D.
The Honda NSX is Honda’s famous supercar. The hosts say the next NSX was planned as a V10, but it was canceled before it could happen, which they treat as a major turning point for Honda’s performance identity.
Formula 1 is the highest level of auto racing with purpose-built race cars. The hosts mention Honda pulling out of it to show how big the company’s change was.
The Honda S2000 is a sports car made by Honda. It’s designed to be light and fun, with power sent to the rear wheels. The podcast mentions it because it was discontinued, and its design was a big part of why people liked it.
The Honda Accord is a mid-size car made by Honda. It’s meant for comfortable daily driving, like commuting and family use. The podcast brings it up because it sold very well and helped Honda succeed in the mainstream market.
The Honda Civic is a small car made by Honda. It’s designed for everyday driving and is known for being practical and efficient. The podcast mentions it because it sold very well and helped make Honda a big player in the market.
“Type R” badges are Honda’s designation for performance-focused versions, typically tuned for sharper throttle response, higher-revving behavior, and a more track-oriented setup. In this segment, they’re used to represent the founder’s “rebel” performance spirit that persisted through Honda’s lineup.
This means a four-cylinder engine that’s tuned to rev very high. The host is saying Honda’s enthusiast identity was tied to that kind of engine feel—especially in performance cars and racing.
The Nürburgring is a well-known race track in Germany that car people use to judge how fast and capable a car really is. The host mentions it to show the Honda prototype was already extremely quick.
This describes a big 10-cylinder engine (a V10) placed in the front of the car, with a total size of 5.5 liters. The host is emphasizing that the canceled Honda plan was serious, not just an idea.
Car
HSV O10 GT
The HSV O10 GT is a Honda race car that came from a prototype that never made it to the street. It raced in Japan’s Super GT series and was good enough to win the championship right away.
Super GT is a major racing series in Japan where teams race highly developed performance cars. The host points out that the HSV O10 GT won there, showing it wasn’t just a “cool prototype,” it was truly competitive.
Electrification means the car uses electric power in a bigger way—like a hybrid system or an electric motor. In this story, it affected how the car had to be built.
A rotary engine is a different kind of engine than the usual piston design. Instead of pistons going up and down, it uses a spinning rotor, which is part of why Mazda’s RX cars feel so distinctive.
The Mazda RX-8 is a rotary-powered sports car. In this segment, it’s important because the host says the last one was built in 2012, ending that classic rotary era.
The Mazda Miata (MX-5) is a small two-seat sports car. It’s built to be light and easy to drive, with power going to the rear wheels. The podcast mentions it because it stayed in production while other sports models ended.
“Jimba Itai” is Mazda’s idea that the car and driver should feel like one unit. Instead of the car taking over, it should help you feel what you’re doing and respond in a natural way.
LIVE
The Skyline GT-R had beaten Porsche's. It had won 29 consecutive races in Japanese touring
car competition. It had traveled the world in shipping containers, going to countries
that were never supposed to have it. And in 2002, Nissan killed it.
That wasn't all. By 2006, Toyota had no sports car in its lineup at all. Within a couple years,
Honda had cancelled a supercar and Mazda was watching its rotary engine run out of time.
In the late 2000s, the market for Japanese sports cars was shrinking. Emissions regulations were
tightening. Young Japanese people had largely stopped wanting cars at all. By every reasonable
measure, the golden era of JDM was ending. But somehow, the cars that followed were among
the greatest Japanese performance cars ever built. A handful of engineers saw the end coming and
chose, for reasons that didn't always make commercial sense, to go out with a bang. To make
the last thing, the best thing. Today on Pass Gas, it's how the golden age went out.
Hey guys, how are you doing? Welcome back to Pass Gas. My name is Nolan Sykes. This week,
we're getting towards the end here of our story. This is it. This is the fireworks. GT-R,
new NSX, LFA, 86. Also, what the heck's Mazda doing at this time between like 2000 and 2010 is
kind of the time period we're talking about. That's what we're getting into today. Really cool
stuff. It's more of like a time of reflection for these companies. You know, the economy is not
going to be doing great in 2008, but they're still going to be trying stuff out. They're still
proving themselves. But it's not so much a competition between them and more like they're
all entering like their reflective, like you know what, when bands, like after their first
couple albums, they go away for a little while and then like make another album reflecting on like
how much fun it's been being on the road and like being a rock star. That's kind of like the
era they're in almost. This era is like, like Deftones, they got like Coino Yo Can, right? An
album that's definitely after the golden age of initial popularity, but maybe some of their best
work hot take by me. Maybe Coino Yo Can. That's Deftones record. I stand by it. Rosemary. You're
going to tell me Rosemary doesn't go hard as hell. Yeah, I don't think so. Anyway, let's get into
this episode.
A year before the R34 ended production, Nissan CEO Carlos Gone unveiled a new GTR concept at the
R34's, just a car on stage and Gones assurance that the name would survive. The press swarmed him
with questions. His answer? No comment.
It was a placeholder, a way of saying the name would survive without committing to anything
about what that actually meant. Meanwhile, the skyline itself was being remade into a semi
luxury car. It would eventually reach American showrooms as the Infinity G35, then the G37, then
the Q50. The GTR badge and the skyline name, which have been inseparable for decades, were now going
their separate ways.
Someone had to figure out what the next GTR actually was. That job went to a chief engineer
named Kazutoshi Mizuno. Gone gave him a starting point, the FM platform. It was efficient. It was
proven. It underpinned Nissan's entire rear wheel drive lineup. It was built around a conventional
layout, the engine in the front, the gearbox behind it, and power sent to the rear. What
Mizuno needed was something fundamentally different.
The GTR's performance targets required near perfect 5050 weight distribution, the kind of balance
that separates a car that handles from a car that dances. Achieving it meant putting the
gearbox at the back of the car in front of the rear axle, separated from the engine entirely.
The FM platform wasn't designed for that. And adapting it wasn't just a modification. It was a
total redesign. And rebuilding someone else's platform from scratch is not the same as building
the right platform from scratch.
What made the pressure even greater was the mythology surrounding the GTR name, which had
been growing for years.
Gran Turismo had put the Skyline GTR on a 100000000 screens. The grey market had been
shipping R32s and R33s into countries that were never supposed to have them, like the United
States, Australia, and the UK.
The Fast and Furious franchise had made the Skyline nameplate recognizable to people who had
never heard of Shinichiro Sakurai, or the 1964 Japanese Grand Prix, or the gentleman's agreement
that had kept the car's official horsepower a polite fiction for 15 years.
The follow up couldn't just be good.
It had to be worthy of everything the name had become while Nissan wasn't looking.
Mizuno didn't wait for official approval or a formal development process. He built a working
prototype early because he felt the weight of the GTR name demanded proof, not paperwork.
The only way to make his argument was to let the car speak for itself.
The RB26, the inline 6 engine that had powered every GTR from the R32 through the R34, was
brilliant but dated.
Nissan had wanted to replace it with the V6 as far back as the R34's launch, but never
had the money or time to develop such an engine. Now they did, and the RB26's time was finally up.
Mizuno and his powertrain chief, Naoki Nakata, designed a replacement from scratch, the VR38
DETT, a 3.8 liter twin turbocharged V6. Its 60 degree architecture was more compact than the
inline 6, which made it easier to sit low and centrally in a chassis that needed perfect
weight distribution. It was designed from the get-go to produce 480 horsepower, with plenty of room to grow beyond that.
With the engine settled, Mizuno turns the platform.
He started with the Infiniti G35, Nissan's most sophisticated rear-wheel drive car at the time.
He stripped it down to its essentials, the floor pan, the structural geometry,
the suspension pickup points that define how a car behaves through a corner.
Everything that made it a grand tour came out. All that remained were the bones.
It's kind of funny now thinking about this being the foundation when every G35 you see on the road
here now is completely clapped. There's going to be a G35 that goes on bring a trailer that sells
for like $75,000 because it's just mint. It's going to happen.
From there, Mizuno rebuilt those bones outward, with entirely new components
oriented around his performance targets, rather than the G35's comfort-oriented ones.
Inwent the prototype VR38 DETT. Also was a version of Nissan's Ateza ETS
all-wheel drive system. Inwent a rear-mounted dual-clutch transmission. The G35 body stayed on
top. At first glance, you wouldn't suspect a thing, but one look under the hood and you'd be
face-to-face with something entirely new. A rolling proof of concept for a platform Mizuno was calling
the premium midship. When he brought it back to GONE, it was clear Mizuno was well ahead of where
anyone expected. GONE stepped back entirely and gave Mizuno full development authority over the project.
The development process that followed was unlike anything Nissan had ever done before.
Mizuno assembled a team in which roughly 80% of the engineers came not from performance car
backgrounds, but from Asuzu's passenger car division. People who had spent their careers
building trucks and commercial vehicles. Why? Well, Mizuno was direct about this later.
They were essentially novices when it came to building a supercar, but they brought something
that experience alone doesn't guarantee. Precision. Process discipline. The habits of people who
build things that have to work in extreme conditions without failure. Mizuno later described
what got them through as strong teamwork and determination. They took those habits and turned
them towards a problem none of them had ever faced before. The VR38 was hand assembled in a
temperature-controlled clean room at Nissan's Yokohama plant by a team of four master craftsmen
called Takumi, the Japanese word for artisan. Each engine took roughly two hours to build from
375 individual components. When a Takumi completed an engine, they signed a plaque that was fitted to
the block. For chassis refinement, Mizuno sent the prototype to Lotus Engineering in England.
It was Lotus, after all, who had brought their Lotus 23s to Suzuka in 1963 and taught Japan a
lesson about lightweight engineering that the industry never forgot. That's a cool little full
circle moment there. Then Mizuno made one more significant decision. He argued that the R35
should not carry the Skyline badge. Every GTR before had been a Skyline first and a GTR second.
Its identity had always been partially defined by what it evolved from.
Mizuno thought this one should stand alone. A global performance brand in its own right
measured only against the best performance cars in the world.
Mizuno got what he wanted. The Skyline would live on, but the GTR would stand alone.
In dropping the Skyline suffix, Mizuno was saying something that went beyond any spec sheet
change. He was saying the GTR was no longer in conversation with its own past. It was a car
vacuum. To understand what was at stake, we have to go back a few years to the company Carlos Gown
had inherited when he arrived in Tokyo. In the late 80s, Japan was in the grip of one of the great
economic bubbles in modern history. Major corporations flushed with cheap credit were
pouring money into financial and real estate speculation instead of their core businesses.
Nissan was no exception. When the bubble burst in the early 1990s, it took a significant portion
of corporate Japan with it. For Nissan, the damage was severe, enormous debt, a product lineup that
hadn't been properly developed in years, and management culture where executives spent their
energy protecting their own positions rather than solving problems.
By 1998, Nissan was losing $1,000 on every car it sold in the United States. Their domestic
market share had fallen from 34% in 1974 to below 14%, seven consecutive years of losses,
$20 billion of debt. That's when French carmaker Renault saw an opening. In March 1999, Renault,
the French automaker founded in 1899, purchased a 37% stake in Nissan for $5.5 billion and sent
Carlos Gown to Tokyo to run the company. Gown was a Lebanese-Brazilian executive who had already
restructured Michelin's North American operations and then Renault itself, earning the nickname
Likoste Killer along the way. He wasn't the first non-Japanese person to lead a Japanese automaker,
but his arrival still came with a culture shock. Gown spoke no Japanese. He had never worked in
the Japanese auto industry. He carried a reputation for closing plants and cutting jobs. Inside Nissan,
many people were nervous about what he would slash. His first seven months, though,
were not what anyone had expected. Gown did almost nothing except listen to the engineers,
the designers, the factory workers, the sales staff. Everyone who had been watching the company
fail for seven years was invited to share their view of why it happened. From that,
Gown formed nine cross-functional teams made entirely of existing Nissan employees.
The people who had been living inside the failure were now asked to design the recovery.
Then in October of 1999, at the Tokyo Motor Show, he stood before the press and announced the Nissan
Revival Plan, and he said something that had almost never been said by a corporate exec in Japan.
I will resign if these commitments are not met.
The cultural changes that came with the plan were as significant as the financial ones.
Promotion had always been based on seniority. Japanese corporate tradition favors age
over performance, and Gown eliminated that. Merit replaced tenure.
Younger engineers who had been waiting years to be heard found themselves in rooms where ideas
were the currency. One source described the atmosphere inside Nissan after the announcement
simply, there was excitement to contribute again.
Now, all that excitement needed somewhere to go. A company that had spent a decade paralyzed by
it needed next was a car that could show the world what that felt like. Something that said,
in a form anyone could understand, that Nissan was back.
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In the automotive world, that kind of car has a name, a halo car.
A flagship built not primarily to sell, but to define what a manufacturer stands for and pull
everything beneath it upward. That car was the R35 GT-R and the 2007 Tokyo Motor Show
was where Nissan introduced it to the world.
As the R35 GT-R drove onto the stage, a surge of photographers rushed forwards.
One journalist wrote that he had never seen such a crush of cameras
angling for the first look at a new car. Then Carlos Ghosn stepped forward and said something
that stopped the room. He told the press that Mizuno had taken the car to the Nürburgring.
The track that had become the global benchmark for performance cars.
His time, in damp conditions, was 7 minutes 38 seconds. For reference, the Porsche 911 Turbo's
time was 7 minutes 40. For Nissan, those two seconds meant everything.
43 years after Shinichiro Sakurai watched a Porsche pull away from his skyline at Suzuka,
the gap had been closed. But not everyone saw it that way.
Porsche didn't take the result quietly. They took a customer spec R35 to the Nürburgring,
posted a time of 7.54 and announced that Nissan's car couldn't have been a standard production model.
In other words, they called Nissan cheaters. Mizuno didn't care. In 2008,
he returned to the Nürburgring and clocked a 7.32. Then, in 2009, he walked away with a 7.29. Wow.
Each improvement further proved that their success wasn't a fluke.
Made Porsches accusations harder to sustain. The automotive press responded accordingly.
The awards came from everywhere. Motor trend and automobile magazine in the U.S.
Car magazine and what car in the U.K.
What car? I love that. With a question mark, love that.
The 2009 world performance car of the year voted on by jurors from 25 countries,
and the cars it was beating out told the full story. Porsche 911, Corvette ZR1, Audi R8,
Lamborghini Gallardo, Ferrari 430 Scuderia. Cars that cost two to three times as much
were manufacturers who had owned that conversation for decades.
The R35 beat all of them. Mizuno continued refining the R35 until his retirement in 2013.
In his final year, the Nismo variant, with its optional and attack package of aerodynamic
and suspension upgrades, lapped the Nürburgring in seven minutes, eight seconds.
Peeris could argue about what counted as stock. What they couldn't argue with was the trajectory.
Every year, the car got faster. Even as the era that produced it was winding down,
the R35 kept improving. The golden age was ending. Nissan's answer to it just kept getting quicker.
Nissan had answered the end of an era with engineering. Toyota's answer began in a bar.
Hokkaido, 2000. Over drinks in a noisy restaurant, Toyota chief engineer Aruhiko Tanahashi told his
boss Tetsuo Hatori, Toyota's chief vehicle engineer, an idea he hadn't been able to let go of.
He wanted to build the ultimate sports car, not a competitive sports car,
not a commercially viable sports car, just the ultimate sports car. Hatori's response? Why not?
That conversation started a 12-year development program that would eventually produce one of the
most extraordinary cars ever built by a Japanese manufacturer. But in the year 2000,
it was just two men in a bar making a decision that had no business being made there.
Everything that followed came down to that same quality. The ability to look at an impossible idea
and say, why not? The company Tanahashi worked for had once been capable of exactly this thing.
Toyota had built the 2000 GT. They had produced the AE86, the Supra, and the MR2,
the very car that gave a generation of enthusiasts their first real understanding
of what a Japanese sports car could feel like. But by 2000, that company was nowhere to be seen.
Toyota had become the world's largest car manufacturer by volume,
and its lineup reflected that. The Camry, the RAV4, the Corolla, reliable, endlessly refined,
and viewed by the enthusiast community as utterly soulless compared to what Toyota used to make.
The Supra had been discontinued in 2002. Like Nissan and the Skyline,
emissions regulations had made the 2JZ engine too expensive to update.
The MR2 was killed in 2005. The Celica followed in 2006, a victim of declining sales in a
market that had stopped caring about affordable sports coupes. When the Celica ended, Toyota had
no sports car in its lineup at all. My friend Katie had a Celica, the latest one,
like the really pointy one, and it had that sports package too that gave it the body kit
and the wing and stuff. That was a really fun car. Worse of all though, the data suggested
that the Japanese public didn't really care about any of this. Japan's car market had peaked at 7.78
million units in 1990. By 2008, it was heading below 5 million for the first time in three decades.
Some of that was economic, but an Akai survey found that only 25% of Japanese people in their 20s
actually wanted to own a car in 2008, down from 48% in 2000. That part wasn't about affordability.
The Japanese automotive industry had a phrase for what was happening.
Carumabonare, or demotorization, the voluntary separation of a generation from cars.
Wages had flattened during the last decade. The prosperity that made the 1980s feel limitless
had given way to something more cautious, more anxious.
Young, urban Japanese were saving rather than spending, and when they did spend, it was on
mobile phones, personal computers, and digital entertainment.
The cars that did retain status among the young Japanese during this period weren't sports cars.
They were vehicles like the Toyota Alphard. What is that? They were large,
prestige minivans that communicated wealth through comfort and space rather than the
ability to take a corner at speed. Even Toyota's own domestic sales chief admitted it.
The status symbol had moved from your driveway to your pocket.
The rest of the world, however, hadn't gotten the memo.
Japan wasn't the only market that mattered, and outside Japan, the appetite for what Japanese
automakers could build hadn't gone anywhere. Haruhiko Tanahashi recognized this.
He saw the need to prove that Toyota's soul was still alive,
that somewhere inside the world's largest car company, there was creative ambition
capable of inspiring the culture once again.
His first call was to Huromu Narise.
Narise was Toyota's master driver. He had spent years developing cars at the Nürburgring, going
back to the days of the Mark III Supra, and knew better than anyone what a truly great car actually
needed to feel like from behind the steering wheel. For what Tanahashi was trying to build,
he needed Narise in the room. Together, they built a list of 500 individual
qualities the car needed, from the engine's power delivery to the sound it made at 9,000 rpm.
Every detail was debated and agreed upon before any work began. The document they produced was the
most complete and obsessive definition of that goal that either of them had ever put on paper.
Then, Narise made a recommendation. They needed someone inside Toyota's corporate structure,
someone with enough authority to protect a 12-year project from the accountants
who would inevitably question why the world's largest car maker was spending money on something
with no guaranteed return. I mean, this is a super valid concern as we'll see later.
They didn't know it was going to take 12 years. They essentially had to design the car twice,
because of advances in technology. Also, all this sounds great when you're a part of the team,
but your team, as we've seen in the series, your team is also in the context of the entire
corporate structure in which your work is able to be done. That means that other people are
trying to do their job, save the company money, keep track of the company's spending, and if
you're just dumping money into a project, people are going to have questions. Oftentimes,
especially on some of our older episodes of Pass Gas, the bean counters are the enemy here,
but they're doing their job too. They're just trying to keep you from tanking the company,
working on a multi-million-dollar carbon fiber supercar of which the engine is the only thing
that that engine ever goes into. Fair play. Who was this person who would protect them? Narise
recommended Akio Toyoda. Toyoda was the grandson of the company's founder, and by most expectations,
it's future president. He was also one of Narise's students. Narise had taught him to
drive properly at the Nürburgring. Toyoda even raced cars competitively under a pseudonym,
because the board felt it was inappropriate. So yeah, he would race under the pseudonym
Morizo Konishita to protect his identity. And now, you can get the Morizo edition of the
GR Corolla to commemorate that. That's a little wink, wink, nod, nod.
So, when Tanahashi and Narise brought him into the conversation, Toyoda didn't need any convincing.
He had felt the loss of Toyoda's sporting identity as personally as either of them had.
He was in, and with Toyoda on board, the project was green lit.
The first prototype was completed in June 2003. Tanahashi had promised Toyoda he would be the
first person to drive whatever they built. That fall, a heavily disguised prototype made its way
to the Nürburgring with Toyoda driving. What came back was confirmation. The car performed beyond
what any of them had put on paper, and the team returned from Germany knowing they were onto
something real. In January 2005, the team unveiled its first public version at the Detroit Motor Show
under Toyoda's Lexus banner, calling it the LFA concept. It was an aluminum car at this point,
built over a chassis of extrusions and castings. The press responded enthusiastically.
Here was proof that Toyoda still had something to say. What the press saw as a breakthrough,
Tanahashi saw as unfinished. The car's performance numbers were strong, but it wasn't hitting all
500 points on his list. The chassis wasn't stiff enough for its weight. The weight wasn't low
enough for its power. Nobody else would have known the difference. By any reasonable standard,
the car was ready. But reasonable standards were not what he was imagining in that bar in Hokkaido
in 2000. Haruhiko Tanahashi went back to the lab. What did the car need that the aluminum version
couldn't give it? More rigidity without more weight? The answer, it turned out, was already
emerging in another part of Toyota engineering. Toyota R&D chief Kazuo Okamoto came to Tanahashi
with a material called carbon fiber. By the mid-2000s, it was gaining serious traction across
industries, from bicycles to supercars. Carbon fiber solved the problem that had been at the
center of the LFA's development from the start. Tanahashi needed a chassis that was both stiffer
and lighter than what aluminum could produce. With conventional materials, those two requirements
are in direct conflict. Adding rigidity means adding material, and adding material means adding
weight. Carbon fiber breaks that relationship. It's stronger than steel, but lighter than aluminum,
which meant for the first time, Tanahashi could have both things at once.
The problem was, nobody inside Toyota knew how to build a chassis out of carbon fiber to the
standards the LFA required. And outsourcing wasn't an option. The tolerances Tanahashi needed,
the specific weave patterns required for the chassis to behave exactly as he intended,
nobody in the world was working at that level. Toyota ended up building their own weave machines
from scratch and trained their own technicians to run them, which is ironic because Toyota's
entire business started from manufacturing looms in the first place. Each LFA chassis took 10 days
to construct. The car that had been five years from production was now further away than that.
The budget already spent was dwarfed by what would need to come next. Tanahashi kept going.
The LFA was never going to answer a commercial question, was going to answer a philosophical
one. What is the most perfect version of this thing that we are capable of building? That
question had no budget and no deadline. The engine came out of the same process,
co-developed with the Yamaha's engineering division, the same company that had helped
Toyota build the 2000 GT's engine four decades earlier. The partnership that had produced Japan's
first genuine GT car was now building its most extreme one, a naturally aspirated V10.
During development, the team ran into an interesting problem. A conventional analog
tachometer couldn't move fast enough to track the engine revs accurately. The instrument cluster
had to go digital. It was a car so fast its own gauges couldn't keep up with it.
Tanahashi also brought in Yamaha's musical instrument division. These were the people
who built concert grand pianos and orchestral instruments whose entire careers were built
around the precise engineering of sound. He handed them the engine bay and asked them to
treat it like a concert hall. Surge tanks were tuned to specific audio frequencies. Channels
were cut to pipe the intake sound directly into the cabin. Every journalist who drove the LFA said
the same thing. It produced the greatest engine sound of any production car ever built. A V10
screaming to 9000 rpm with the voice unlike anything else on earth. Not because it was loud
but because it was musical engineered by people who understood exactly what sound was supposed to do.
Toyota built 500 LFAs priced at $375,000 each. They lost money on every single one.
But money was never the point. The LFA was never a product. It was proof. A demonstration of what
Toyota was still capable of when nobody was asking them to be practical about it.
The year before the LFA launched, Akiyo Toyota wrote something on Toyota's Gazoo website that
explains exactly why a company would lose money on purpose. He compared sports car development to
the Issei Jingu Shikinin Sengu, the ceremony where Japan's most sacred Shinto shrine is
completely rebuilt every 20 years. Not because it has fallen apart, but specifically to pass
the knowledge of its construction to the next generation. The building is not the point. The
knowledge is. Toyota didn't lose money building 500 LFAs. They spent that money to ensure the
next generation of Toyota engineers would know how to build a perfect car. They were paying for an
education and the knowledge those engineers gained went into every Toyota sports car that came after.
During the long development of the LFA, another project was quietly taking shape inside Toyota,
one that pointed in the opposite direction entirely.
Its origins began with a phone call. In 2007, Akiyo Toyota called a chassis engineer named Tetsuya
Tata and asked to see him urgently. Tata arrived at Toyota's office, convinced he had done something
wrong. What Toyota told him instead was this. Think about building an affordable sports car.
Tata had spent 20 years at Toyota building up to exactly this moment without knowing it.
His career looked nothing like preparation for a sports car.
Chassis control systems, ABS development, three years in Europe validating WRC cars,
then a decade as chief engineer of compact budget vehicles, cars whose entire purpose was reliable
transportation at a price ordinary people could manage. But that wasn't the whole story.
East South Suzuki, the chief engineer of the AE80 Supra, had taught Tata early in his career to be
patient. That the way to build a sports car was to first spend years learning how to build everything
else well and cheaply. Tata had taken that seriously. Every budget car, every cost constraint,
every compromise had been preparation. When Akiyo Toyota called, Tata was ready like nobody else
could have been. Tata's first move was to go and talk to the people the car was supposed to be for,
the drifters and the toge runners, the people who had fallen in love with the AE86 through a VHS tape,
a manga series or a parking lot at two in the morning.
He wanted to understand what they actually wanted before he decided what to build.
What he found contradicted everything Toyota's product planners had assumed.
The conventional wisdom inside car companies when it came to sports cars was what Tata came to call
the devil's cycle. The belief that enthusiasts always wanted more, more power, more technology,
more complexity, more cost, that each new generation of sports cars had to escalate beyond the last.
The enthusiasts Tata spoke to wanted the opposite. They kept coming back to the same references,
old Sylvia's AE86's simple lightweight rear-wheel drive cars that rewarded skill rather than horsepower.
Cars a young driver could afford to buy, modify, break, fix, and break again.
Cars that were platforms for engagement rather than objects of consumption.
That discovery became the foundation of everything Tata built.
And it was reassuring because what those people were nostalgic for was exactly what he had always
wanted to make. His principles were straightforward, rear-wheel drive and naturally aspirated,
priced within the reach of a young driver, not a wealthy collector. And for the engine,
Tata needed something compact enough to keep the hood low and still package four seats.
A flat box configuration suited what Tata needed, short enough to package correctly,
low enough in the chassis to help the weight distribution.
There is this one manufacturer that built its entire reputation around the boxer engine.
And as it happened, Toyota had recently acquired a 16.5% stake in their parent company, Subaru.
Tata approached Subaru about jointly developing a boxer engine low enough to sit where he needed it.
Subaru said no. Every car they made was all-wheel drive. That wasn't just a technical choice,
it was a promise to their buyers, one they had been keeping for decades.
Getting involved in a rear-wheel drive sports car was the opposite of everything the Subaru name
stood for. The project stalled for six months. The tension between the two companies ran deeper
than a simple brand disagreement. Subaru's engineers were wary of being junior partners to
Toyota. There was barely a working relationship between the two sides. Tata's answer wasn't
a stronger argument. It was the car itself. Despite the tension, Tata kept developing
his prototype with help from both Toyota and Subaru, and was finally far enough along to get
reps from Subaru behind the wheel, something shifted. As Tata put it later, before the prototype,
they felt like two separate companies. After it, they felt like one team.
Subaru agreed to commit fully to the project, and from that point, they were all in.
Tata's assistant chief engineer Yoshinori Sasaki would later describe that day as the start of Team 86.
The development code had always been 086A, not by accident. Tata chose it before a single body
panel had been shaped. Before, Subaru said yes. Before, the board approved anything. He had always
known what this car was supposed to be. A successor to the Hachi Roku, the AE86. The car that Tsuchiya
had made famous on the mountain passes in Initial D had turned into a jeep. The car that Tsuchiya
used was a generation symbol. There were voices in the community who argued it should be called
the Celica. The logic was tidy. The original AE86 had been a Corolla, so the car above it
in Toyota's lineup should carry the Celica nameplate. But Tata understood something that
argument missed. The Celica name carried nostalgia. The Hachi Roku name carried devotion.
Nearly 20 years after production ended, the AE86 still commanded the following that most current
cars never achieve. Calling this car the 86 was a message to the generation that had grown up loving
something Toyota had stopped making. We heard you. We built a new one.
When the car debuted at the Tokyo Motor Show in December 2011, 7,000 orders were placed in the
first month of Japanese sales alone. But Tata cared about more than sales numbers. After every
development test, the team asked their driver one question. Did you enjoy it? The people who bought
it gave their answer. They took it to track days and drift events and mountain passes.
The autocross events and parking lots at night. They modified it, tuned it, broke it, and fixed it
exactly as Tata had intended.
From the LFA to the 86, Toyota's response to the end of the Golden Era was not a single answer,
but two, arrived at independently by different men in different corners of the same company.
Tata Hashi had asked what the most perfect sports car Toyota could build would look like,
then spent 12 years finding out. Tata had asked what sports car a young driver could actually
afford and fall in love with, and built that instead. Toyota didn't choose between honoring
their past and exceeding it. They did both. But not every manufacturer made the same choice.
On December 17, 2008, Honda CEO Takeo Fukui stood before the press in Tokyo to deliver bad news.
The global financial crisis had hit Honda hard. Profits were down 81 percent. Restructuring was
necessary. But the financial figures weren't the worst of it. Honda was withdrawing from Formula
1 immediately. 2008 would be their final season. In the next generation NSX, a V10 supercar confirmed
to the press in December 2007, deep enough into development to have already been tested at the
Nurburgring was canceled, effective immediately. Honda's entire performance identity ended on the same day.
Three weeks later came the third announcement. The S2000 would be discontinued. The lightweight
rear-wheel-drive roadster that had been Honda's most driver-focused production car since the
original NSX. Production ceased in June of 2009, with just 355 cars built in the final model year.
Taken together, those three announcements described something larger than a financial pivot.
Honda was no longer the company Sirichiro Honda had built. The company whose engineers had
marched into those midi offices to contest industry regulations that had built a racing
engine in a shed that had produced the original NSX not because the market asked for it but because
the engineers decided it needed to exist. By 2008, that instinct had been slowly replaced by something
more careful. Fuel efficiency, reliability. The mainstream market was keeping the lights on
and Honda had decided their job was to keep it happy. Things had been drifting this way since
Sirichiro Honda died in 1991. The Civic and the Accord sold in enormous numbers, and commercially
that was the right call. But the rebel soul of the founder had survived through Honda's presence
in motorsport, through Type R badges and high-revving four-cylinders. All of that disappeared
in a single press conference.
But what made the December 2008 announcement so painful wasn't just that Honda gave up,
it's what they gave up on. The car Honda canceled was not a concept or a sketch or
a product planning exercise. It was a functioning prototype that had already lapped the Nurburgring
faster than the R35 GTR's official debut time. A front-mounted 5.5-liter V10 producing somewhere
between 550 and 600 horsepower. The anticipation was real, the car was nearly there.
When it was canceled though, the chassis didn't disappear. Honda repurposed it as the HSV
O10 GT, a race car that competed in Japan's Super GT series between 2010 and 2013.
It won the championship in its debut season, and over four seasons it took nine race wins
and eight pole positions. So this thing was pretty capable, man.
The car Honda wouldn't put on the road was good enough to win Japan's premier racing series.
It spent its life going around circuits in a domestic championship that most of the global
enthusiast community never watched. Then it was retired. That was that.
Honda said it plainly years later, canceling the NSX and S2000 was what the company's executives
regretted most. Not because the cars were commercially necessary, but because a manufacturer
that stops making sports cars loses something that can't easily be recovered. The relationship
between a company and its enthusiasts is built over decades, but can be broken in months.
The NSX did return in 2016, eight years after the V10 version was killed.
But the car that arrived was not the car that had been promised.
For starters, this one was built in Ohio. It had a hybrid V6 instead of a naturally aspirated V10.
It was all wheel drive, not because the engineers had chosen it, but because electrification
required it. It was still impressive, but it was a different answer to a different question
from a different Honda. I've ridden in one of those NSX's on a racetrack. I got to go to
the Long Beach Grand Prix a few years ago and ride with a race car driver in that car around that
track. I'd still own that thing. It's sick as hell. And also, when you see them on the street,
because they haven't sold very many of them, it's a special car. It's got these asterisks
around it that we mentioned, but it's still sick as hell. I will stand by that.
So, Nissan had seen the end of the era coming and built the R35. Toyota had seen it and built
the LFA in 86. Honda had seen it too. They had even built their answer, a car that would have
stood as one of the definitive Japanese performance cars of all time. But Honda cancelled it,
and the era closed without them.
Nissan and Toyota were building monuments. Honda had gone silent, but Mazda was doing
something entirely different. Not with a halo car, not with a 12 year development program,
or a Nurburgring lap time, or a name borrowed from a beloved predecessor.
Nissan's answer was quieter than any of those things, and in some ways more honest than all of
them. But before we get to that, there was an ending that deserved more ceremony than it received.
The rotary engine had been the spine of Mazda's identity for 45 years. It was the
technology that had saved the company from government forced consolidation in the 1960s,
that Kenichi Yamamoto and his 47 Ronin had spent two years problem solving to make viable.
It had survived the RX2, 3, 4, 7, and 8. It had survived oil crises, and every commercial
argument that should have killed it. But emissions regulations were always the rotary's most
dangerous opponent. The engine's fundamental design made it difficult to make clean.
And as standards tightened through the 2000s, the gap between what the rotary produced and what the
regulations allowed became impossible to close. When the last RX8 came off the line in 2012, it was gone.
But Mazda kept moving. The MX-5 Miata was still in production on the day the last RX8 rolled out.
Still built in the same city, still front engine, rear wheel drive, and affordable. Still organized
around the philosophy Mazda called Jimba Itai, or horse and rider as one.
The idea that a car should feel like an extension of the driver rather than a machine the driver is
operating. That philosophy wasn't new in 2012. It had been the Miata's founding principle since
the car debuted at the Chicago Auto Show in 1989. While every other sports car of its era was asking
what it could do, the Miata was asking how it felt. That was a different question.
And it attracted a different kind of loyalty. People loved it because it gave back something
the industry had been slowly taking away. The feeling of actually driving. Not being managed
by the car. Not being transported by it. Driving it. Every market survey said the lightweight
roadster segment was dead. Mazda kept building one anyway. That stubbornness traceable all the
way back to a small company in Hiroshima that survived by refusing to make the obvious choice
is what kept them alive through everything the industry threw at them. They built what they
believed in. They made it as purely as they could. And they trusted that the people who needed to find
it would. They did.
Let's go all the way back to Suzuka, 1963. Not to the race. Porsche or the Fair Lady
or the Skyline GT chasing something it had no business chasing. But to the crowd.
To the people who had traveled from surrounding towns just to see something that had never happened
before. A generation that had grown up in a country defined by devastation now watching
Japanese machines on a Japanese track being pushed to their absolute limit.
What that crowd felt in those stands without being fully able to say why was that everything
was about to change. It did. And for 60 years it kept changing. Then the era ended.
But the people are still here. The cars are still here. The community that built itself
around six decades of Japanese engineering is still very much alive. It just finds itself
in a world that looks nothing like the one that produced it.
Which brings us to the only question left to ask. What comes next? What does the future
of Japanese car culture look like after the golden era has come and gone?
That's what we're talking about next week on the season finale of past gas.
Thank you guys so much for listening. That was a long one.
But man, that era from like 2006 to like 2018. It was fun to like read all that because I feel
like I had so much stuff going on in my life there. I forgot so much of this or wasn't I wasn't
even aware of it. Let's be honest. Not that I forgot. It's because I was busy with other life
stuff going on. But like, man, I was really fun to revisit. Hope you guys are enjoying this series.
Like I said, we got finale next week. And then we have a little addendum, little epilogue
following that. So two more episodes. And this has just been a really great, great season so far,
I think. I've been really enjoying this. And I hope you guys have as well. So anyway,
follow me at Nolan J. Sykes if you'd like. Big thank you to our writers, Anthony Hardin,
Greg Nix, Audrey Holden. I got Joe across from me at the tail right now, recording me.
Thank you so much, Joe. And our editor, Mark Schroeder. Man, it's been really good. Okay,
we'll see you next week. How about that?
About this episode
Skyline GT-R mythology meets late-2000s reality as emissions pressure and shifting demand helped close the JDM “golden era.” The hosts walk through how Nissan rebuilt the GT-R—FM platform starting point, 50/50 balance goals, RB26 to VR38 DETT, and Takumi clean-room assembly—then use Nürburgring lap-time challenges to define the R35 as a true halo car. Toyota and Honda follow with their own halo efforts (LFA, canceled NSX V10), while Mazda’s rotary era ends and driver-first philosophies like Jimba Itai keep the story moving.
By the late 2000s, shrinking markets, tightening emissions, and a younger generation losing interest in vehicles signaled the end of the legendary JDM era. But a few rebellious engineers refused to go quietly, choosing instead to make their last cars arguably their greatest.
In this second-to-last episode of Past Gas: The Golden Era of JDM, we explore the dramatic conclusion of Japan's greatest automotive era. Discover how Nissan built the R35 GT-R from scratch to successfully crush Porsche at the Nurburgring, why Toyota intentionally lost money on every screaming V10 LFA they built to educate their next generation of engineers, the heartbreaking cancellation of Honda's highly anticipated V10 NSX, and how Mazda kept the pure driving spirit alive despite the death of the rotary engine.
This episode is brought to you by Lumi Gummies! Go to https://www.LumiGummies.com and use code PASTGAS for 30% off your order!
