Quick Reads: Nissan Skyline GT-R Ultimate Portfolio
Do you like magazines? I love
magazines. I like them so much I have a perennially large backlog of
them that I can never seem to reduce. I'll tote a bunch along anytime
I expect to have to sit waiting somewhere and they're one of my favorite ways for me to keep my impatient self sane when I have to spend valuable time in
a waiting room, airport terminal, or perched atop the great porcelain
throne doing my morning rituals.
If you like magazines the way I do then
you'll want the book I'm featuring today – the Nissan Skyline GT-R
Ultimate Portfolio. Unlike the two books I featured in my first Quick Reads article it's not an original text on Nissan's ultimate
performance car, instead it's actually a compilation of magazine
articles dating back to the the time of the original Hakosuka GT-R of
the '60s up to 2010 when the R35 first arrived.
There's a total of 46 magazine excerpts
all told, mainly from British publications but with a healthy
Australian portion as well. Understandably only a few articles come
from American writers deprived as we've been of the GT-R until the
R35 came along, but there are at least two that date from before the
current GT-R including one Car and Driver article that I distinctly
remember reading as a kid. Seeing pictures in a car magazine of a
teary-eyed Japanese girl woefully holding a torn-off Supra wing tends
to stick in your mind.
The articles run the gamut from the
original C10 GT-R to the current R35 but there's only two each for
the earliest models, the Hako and the Kenmeri. For the first
generation car there's really only one article since the other listed
in the contents is atually just a spec sheet from a car catalog of
the time. The one proper entry that's in there from Sports Car World
is still a great inclusion because it was published in 1970 when the
Hakosuka was still new so it's interesting to see what the foreign
press back then thought of this upstart performance car from Japan.
For R32 enthusiasts there's a lot more
to go through, the highlight for me is an R32 buyer's guide that goes
over a lot of points that would be good to know for a prospective
san-ni owner. It's a decade
old and published in a British magazine originally but still very
relevant now to us American buyers since it goes over likely trouble
spots like areas prone to rust and common electrical issues to check
for. Once the later generations become legal to import there are also
buyer's guides for the R33 and R34 that should prove handy.
As can be expected
the amount of articles increases with each generation and the R33 has
a bit more than the 32, and the 34 a bit more still. It's a strong
reminder of how hotly anticipated the R35 was that over 50 pages of
the 192 in this book are devoted to that generation. What's odd is
that only the last 32 pages are in color, weird considering a lot of
the other articles were surely not in black and white originally. As
a book for a GT-R fan that's the one major fault I can see with this publication especially considering the original $37.95 asking price. At that price
point full color printing should have been expected for all the articles that were originally like that.
Even with that gripe, overall I think
it's a good addition to any GT-R fan's collection especially since
the magazine articles give you a unique perspective on the cars when
they were new. Most books discuss older cars as they're perceived in
the present time so it's great to read about the different viewpoint
when the model was just released. We all know the Hakosuka was the
start of the GT-R legend nowadays but what did writers at the time
think of it without the rose-colored glasses of history affecting
things? What did they make of the R32 back in the '90s? Was the R33
really seen as a step backward back then as a lot of people like to
claim it is nowadays? Those are the kinds of questions reading old
magazines answer and that's why as more magazines keep writing about
the GT-R I'll keep adding them to my dusty stack of back issues for
future reference. If you treasure that kind of info as well, this
Nissan Skyline GT-R Portfolio is a must-have.
It's currently on Amazon for 30 bucks –
and even cheaper from their marketplace sellers:
The language barrier is one of the hardest things about being a Skyline GTR enthusiast. So many magazines on ebay but they're all in Nihongo. I might have to pull the trigger on this one, even if it's mostly for the R32 section :)
ReplyDeleteI feel you on seeing those Japanese mags and just looking on enviously lol. I keep trying to get further in learning Nihongo but something else keeps popping up and taking my time away - like my R32 right now lol. I don't think you'll be disappointed by this book if you buy it.
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