The start of the GT-R story that began more than half a century ago was truly sublime, and the legend of the Skyline has always been exceptional in the development of JDM, which started there, and the KPGC10 GT-R that started it all with today’s GT-R evolution has become a truly divine entity….

Half a century ago…. The myth of the GT-R began in the late 1960s, when Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. merged with Prince Motors Co.

Prince engineers, including the late Shinichiro Sakurai (1929-2011), who had developed and proven the capabilities of the R380 racing car and successive generations of Prince Skyline cars, were the ones who decided on a detuned R380 when Nissan decided on the C10 Skyline as its next project. They believed that the future of Japanese motorization lay in developing a real race-winning sports car based on the detuned R380 racing engine and the C10 Skyline body, and they had great passion for it…!

With this great passion, the development team led by the late Shinichiro Sakurai and his teammates installed the Nissan S20, a detuned version of the GR8 engine used in the Prince R380, in a 4-door sedan car, thus giving birth to the first Nissan Skyline 2000GT-R….

This 2.0-liter, 24-valve, DOHC six-cylinder engine was developed as a high-revving engine that delivered maximum output of 160ps at 7000rpm and maximum torque of 18.0kgm at 5600rpm…. The development team focused on weight reduction as a further improvement, and in 1970, the KPGC10 was added to the Skyline GT-R with a 2-door hardtop body that was about 20 kg lighter than the previous model, while still carrying a 100-liter fuel tank for long-distance races… The coupe tradition began in the Skyline GT-R. This boxy, battle-hardened car boasted overwhelming speed in races all over Japan, and over a three-year period from May 1969 to March 1972, it recorded a golden record of 49 victories…!

As evidenced by its strength in the racing field, the KPGC10 Skyline was a car that clearly had the competitive power to win in the racing scene, with a durable S20 engine and a four-wheel independent suspension, which was revolutionary at the time…. The suspension was strong enough to compete in the racing field, the suspension settings were rigid, and the steering was extremely heavy, but once the car started running, the feedback from the road surface was very strong. In the blink of an eye, the GT-R captured the hearts of the young people of the time, and spawned a frenzied Skyline party throughout Japan.

In addition to the popularity from those days, today, after half a century has passed, there are many so-called “GT-R specification” modified GTs, etc., and it may be difficult to distinguish them from the genuine ones, but the number of genuine production units is as follows: KPGC10 type (coupe body) is 1197 units, PGC10 type (coupe body) is The number of genuine KPGC10 (coupe body) is 1197, and PGC10 (sedan body) is 832, and there are only about 2000 units, and also the fact is that there are almost no cars from Japan because they were not marketed overseas. However, the image of spartanism has become very popular in the U.S., the U.K., and other countries as well.

The first generation GT-R, the product of the passion of our forefathers, not only laid the foundation for today’s GT-R, but also showed the world what JDM could do at the dawn of Japanese domestic automobile creation…!

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)