NISMO Festival 2009 Part I

Back to back motor sports festivals from two of the biggest Japanese makers in two weeks… Sounds like a dream come true.

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Come December, living in the home countries of two mega automakers definitely has its perks. Two weeks ago we celebrated the end of the Toyota’s participation in F1 and their motor sports season with  the Toyota Motor Sports Festival and this week we were back at Fuji Speedway again to celebrate with Nissan and their NISMO festival.

The first area we checked out was pit lane where, of course, our old Gran Turismo favorites were lined up. All the colors of the NISMO GT-R rainbow were there starting from the Unisia Jecs Group A R32…

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Then the Pennzoil Nismo JGTC BCNR33 GT-R I posted up earlier…

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The super tough Xanavi Nismo GT-R BNR34 from the JGTC ’02 season..

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And a sneaky R35 hiding behind a fresh set of wet rubber on Rays wheels. This was the car Satoshi Motoyama and Benoit Treluyer came first in at round three of SuperGT here at Fuji Speedway.

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Speaking of R35s, it was really disappointing to see that Nissan, bar their own GTRs, had yet again disallowed tuners like HKS and MCR from bringing their own tuned versions to the event. This is rumored to be because of a backlash from local governments over ‘safety concerns’ with the GT-R and its higher amounts of power it is puts out in stock form. How this works with Toyota developing the LF-A I don’t know, but it was disappointing not seeing the latest and greatest from the big tuners. So I guess we’ll have to make do with this HKS R34 GT-R in the mean time.

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One tuning shop who keeps pumping out prime examples of older machines though is R31 House. They had this cool 31 with a copy of the latest livery from its bigger SuperGT brother plastered down the side.

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And a hella cool 31 wagon sitting on some gold BBS wheels..

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An iron fist RB25DET in a velvet glove?

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Back in the garage the 2009 FIA GT-R and 2010 prototypes were garnering all the attention. Words cannot describe how cool these cars look and feel in the flesh.

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For one, just look at that monster gill-like front guard! Nothing unnecessary and there  for a purpose. I think even Jaws would get out of the way if he  were being chased by one of these!

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A closer snap… no pun intended.

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And underneath it was all business too with some huge Brembos biting down on carbon disks. Look at all that honeycomb fiber and ducting keeping things cool in the wheel well.

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In what I think was a total waste, they’ve thrown out the VR38DETT and replaced it with the 5,552cc naturally aspirated VK56DE V8.

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Hearing it on the track, flicking through the Ricardo 6-speed it sounded totally raw and sexual so I may forgive them this once.

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Back in the paddock, there’s been been a shortage of promo girls and talent at events, so we set about to find out where they’ve all been hiding. We were happy to see that they were still floating around, finding one or two hiding out near the Calsonic booth.

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And handing out tissue papers for those ‘unexpected’ moments… We found a few more around the place and decided to ask them to come to lunch, but were flatly denied.

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But it was okay. As soon as we were out of the press room it was already near lunch time and the Z boys were revving up for their Z Challenge Exhibition race. Here’s one of them coming around the last corner of Fuji, pedal to the metal lining up for the big run down main straight.

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And the ProStock team, letting it all hang out.

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I’m going to leave you with the FIA GT-R as it screams up to Fuji corner. There’s still a lot more to come though so check back in soon.

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Peter Horniak

Words/Images: Peter Horniak