Almost Great: Nissan 350Z

The 350 would be launched as a coupé, but would be joined two years later by a roadster version, with a traditional fabric folding roof. Beauty is firmly in the eye of the beholder, I know, but to me the aesthetics of the drop-top never quite worked – the rear deck-lid somehow too long, the rear three-quarter proportions somehow not quite ‘right’.

Under the skin, the 350Z, was, on the face of things, pretty old-school. Simple steel construction, rear wheel drive, and up front a big ol’ 3.5-litre V6. Nothing fancy – few of the unintelligible acronyms that Nissan so loved in the ‘80s, no four-wheel-steer systems as per its predecessor the 300ZX or its R34 Skyline contemporary. Built to a price point, the Z would often be characterised, even by Nissan, as a Japanese muscle car: what you see is what you get, a good ol’ boy of a Japanese bruiser.

That somewhat undersells the work of the Nissan chassis engineers. Led by Chief Engineer Kazutoshi Mizuno, who had cut his teeth in NISMO’s endurance racing department, the Nissan chassis crew cooked up a pretty sophisticated aluminium-intensive front multi-link system, with an unusually long upper ‘wishbone’ or control arm, but with the lower control arm split in two, with two ball-joints connecting it to the steering knuckle. This is a more complex setup than a simple double wishbone, but one that allowed the engineers to play tunes on the castor angle in particular – those twin lower pivots allow for a relatively ‘slack’ castor angle when the wheels are straight ahead, giving good straight-line stability, especially on bumpy roads, but then allow the castor to be reduced (rendered less ‘slack’ i.e more vertical) as the wheel is turned, giving the car the opposite side of the stability coin – a nicely responsive turn-in.

Why such sophistication, you might ask? The Nissan engineers were (rightly) proud of the 14 patents they were granted for the front suspension alone, but why not go for something a bit simpler? Well, I suspect that they already knew that the mass on that front axle was going to be quite considerable – 53 per cent of the weight of an all-steel body, with a relatively big lump of an engine up front? Physics were going to ask a lot of questions of those front tyres, so the chassis engineers wanted to give them a fighting chance of coming up with at least some answers.

The rear suspension was also a proper multi-link affair – no cheapskate live muscle-car axles back here. The rear springs were pushed well out to sit as close to the wheel centres as possible, and the rear towers were linked by a stout strut bar – Nissan even chose to make a design feature of this, with a nice chrome ‘Z’ badge sitting right on top of it, smack bang in the middle of the rear luggage space.

Under the hood, Nissan installed the inevitable VQ35DE engine with 287bhp at 6200rpm and 273lb ft of torque at 4800rpm. This engine would power many Nissans, Infinitis, Samsungs and Renaults and would have the unique distinction of being elected among Ward’s Top 10 Engines (the definitive US engine-fancier’s form book) no less than14 times in a row. From 2005, the 350Z would have the upgraded and wince-inducingly named ‘Rev-Up’ version of this engine, with power up to 300bhp, and two years later it would get the heavily-revised VQ35HR version with another power hike to 307bhp. All of these engines are laudably smooth, powerful and reliable – your favorite uncle of an engine. And we’ll be coming back to this point.

The resulting numbers were more than respectable – 5.9 seconds to 60mph, topping out at 155mph. Twenty-plus years ago, in a pre-EV world, this was fast. It would comfortably smoke the rival Porsche Boxster off the line, and would stick with it on the autobahn. All this despite a relatively porky (at the time) kerbweight of 1545kg for the coupé; specify the droptop with an automatic ‘box, and it would tip the scales at a positively chunky 1650kg: I suspect from the awkward styling of the ragtop and the 100+ kilogram mass penalty that Nissan’s body engineers had not planned an open version from the get-go. It has the distinct whiff of a ‘dammit, we have to chop the top off it’ afterthought.

Launched in the summer of 2002, the 350Z was an immediate hit. Priced at £24,000 in the UK at launch (around £45k today, allowing for inflation), it undercut the Porsche Boxster by around £6000 (over £11,000 in modern money). That initial run of UK cars that Mrs T had been waiting for sold out in literally minutes. It was equally popular in key markets like the US and Germany. In all, the 350Z sold around 183,000 units in its seven year lifetime (coupé and roadster combined) – by comparison, Porsche moved 230,000 Boxsters and Caymen in the same period. Very respectable, I think you will agree, given the brand power of the P-cars’ badge compared to Nissan’s humble hamburger.

Those rascally motoring journalist folk liked it, too. Press pieces of the time praised the design, performance, handling, and excellent value for money. It got some stick for poor refinement – tyre rumble crops up repeatedly – slower and less communicative steering than the Boxster, its budget ‘plasticky’ interior and its lack of interior storage. But by and large, the gentlepersons of the press were indeed gentle with the 350Z.

It all looks good, doesn’t it? Great looks, fast, commercially successful, praised by the hacks. We’re not done – the Zee would build up a very solid motorsports palmarès, gathering silverware in Japan’s ferociously competitive Touring Car and Super GT championships, the SCCA series in the US, and various national GT championships. Its solid construction, simple mechanicals and that evergreen VQ engine made it a reliable and cost-effective racer.

But it really found its niche in that smokiest corner of motorsports – drifting. Like the 200SX before it, the 350Z’s torquey, linear power delivery and rear-biased setup means it became a darling of the slip-not-grip crowd – if you’ve done a beginner’s drift school, there is a reasonable chance that you did it in a beaten-up but still-game 350Z. And they are not just suitable for beginners – 350Zs (albeit heavily-modified ones) were competitive right up to the pinnacle of the sideways sport, the D1 Grand Prix.

Speaking of do-ri-fu-to, the 350Z was also the anti-hero car of what was, to me, by far the best movie of the Fast and Furious franchise: “Tokyo Drift”. The blacked-out Z driven by bad-boy Takashi, aka Drift King, played very well by a suitably sneering Brian Tee, was far cooler than the hero’s red Mitsubishi Evo IX, with its trying-too-hard graphics.

Alright folks, you know it’s coming. If this was a dance tune, we’ve had the build, and you’re all waiting for the drop – that little thing that makes the 350Z an ‘almost’ car and not just a great car.

Popular opinion would refer us back to those hefty kerbweights – this was a car that was just too heavy to be a ‘proper’ sports car. But I am going to be a contrarian and say I disagree on this point. Yes, yes, I know this is a bit hypocritical – I’ve polluted the airwaves and the internet enough over the years banging on about light weight, virtual spirals, low spring rates yada-yada, and here I am saying that the Z wore its weight well. But here’s the thing – it really did. There are a few cars – very few – that have a sort of hewn-from-stone solidity about them – the 350Z is one, the Nissan R35 GT-R another. Going back to Mrs T, one thing she loved about her Z was the ‘solidity’ – it felt stout and strong around her, like sitting in a strongbox, and she actively liked that. Plus, that VQ bent-six had enough poke to disguise the mass. The Z felt properly fast despite its bulk– a bit like one of those Sumo lads who turn out to be surprisingly light on their feet.

No, to me the weak point was – ironically – that multi-award winning, beautifully engineered 3.5-litre V6. It was, in some ways, just too bloody good. I mentioned above that it was like your favourite uncle of an engine – sensible, kind and predictable. Thing is, you don’t always want to hang out with your favourite uncle. Sometimes you want to hang out with that other uncle – the one you’re not even sure is your uncle at all – the one who smokes suspicious cigarettes, drives a noisy motorbike and never seems to have the same girlfriend. The VQ was just too linear, too smooth. It actually reminded me sometimes of an electric motor – perfectly smooth, perfectly linear, no surprises, just push, all the time. It was so damn good that it was – sorry – a bit boring. All the more so when it came from the same company that produced so many great bad-uncle engines – that head-butting SR20 2.0-litre four-cylinder that I’ve lauded before, or the menacing RB26 that made the R32, ’33 and ’34 Skylines so special.

OK, there are other things we could criticize the 350Z for – the fact it’s a strict two-seater with not much space for people or things, the interior that was designed before Nissan learned the phrase ‘perceived quality’, the slightly rough-and-ready feel. But to me they are all parts of the strength of the car – what made it so close to great. It was just that goody-two-shoes engine that let it down…

You may note that I’ve conspicuously not mentioned the 350Z’s successor, the 370Z. Again, each to their own but I personally never liked the looks – its ‘busier’ styling lost a lot of the purity of that original San Diego design.

Finally, I had a quick gander at www.howmanyleft.co.uk to see how many have survived. I was pleasantly surprised to see that there are still north of 3500 left in Britain – so these are not (yet) rare cars. However, you can also see a slightly worrying trend – the number of SORN’d cars has risen ever so steadily over the last five years – a sign that owners are starting to park them up as they run into MoT issues or other minor problems – often the beginning of the end.

I suspect that if you can find a nice, low-mileage original UK car, then it might be something worth hanging on to. Slather it in Waxoyl (they are now old enough to start to have the old tin-worm issues), save it for sunny days, book a few track days, and ignore all my nonsense about that engine.