Almost Great: Nissan 300ZX

Dear reader, please forgive me this stupidly dangerous error of youth. I was 24, stone-cold sober, but high on adrenalin and the whistle of the twin turbos. This was the first time I got to drive a properly quick car, and I will never forget it. That car was a bright have-you-seen-me-yet-red Nissan 300ZX. And I still get sweaty palms thinking about it…

You may well ask how I got those sweaty palms on what was at the time a pretty flash sports car, retailing at around £35,000 – a big wedge of cash back then. Well, I was working for Nissan, at its Technology Centre near Cranfield in the UK. Back then, the company kept two spectacular sports cars on site, ostensibly for technical benchmarking. One was a knee-tremblingly cool R32 Skyline in the plain white that suits those cars so well. The other was the bright-red 300ZX, or Z32 to give it its proper Nissan model code.

Both cars were carefully guarded, the keys kept in a safe, well away from young engineering pups like me, with permission to borrow them requiring personal sign-off from the Managing Director himself. Needless to say, said pups therefore dedicated large amounts of our time to cooking up various excuses for why we needed to drive one or other of these cars, to help us in our work on more humble fare like the Primeras and Micras that were our bread and butter. Several of my colleagues were more creative, or less honest, than I, and I watched jealously as they’d drive off for an overnight or even a weekend fling with one of these coveted supermodels.

The prize for creativity went to one Davie B, who explained to the MD that he absolutely needed to borrow the R32 for a couple of days to carry out some audio system sound quality benchmarking, to help him in his work on the upcoming Nissan Almera. He was, heroically, willing to do this on the weekend, such was his dedication to getting the right sound-staging in that car – which correctly appears on absolutely zero lists of ‘cars with the best sound system ever’. The MD, impressed by Davie B’s work ethic, signed the chit and patted him on the shoulder as the keys were fetched from the vault. Apparently, he did not know that the stripped-down Skyline did not even have speakers, even less an actual audio head unit….

I was not quite so brazen. But finally, my opportunity came. My boss (thanks, Neil!) assigned to me the task of designing the first-ever trip computer in a European Nissan. Yes indeed, every mid-Nineties Nissan minicab driver that ever wanted to know how little fuel he was burning relied on ‘my’ little computer. And the computer had, of course, an outside temperature gauge. No, kids, these were not common before the Nineties.

And – ye Automotive Gods ever be praised! – the 300ZX had an outside temperature gauge. So not only had I a plausible excuse to drive it (to benchmark said temp gauge), but I could even legitimately ask to keep it overnight: to monitor its performance over a 24-hour period, y’see. The MD smiled at me, impressed again at the diligence of his keen young engineers, and before I knew it, I had a signed-off permission slip and a set of 300ZX keys in my hand. Fast forward a few hours and a tank of unleaded later, and I was haring across Dartmoor, paying scant attention to the outside temperature gauge…

So, was it a great car? Well, I’m biased because of this youthful one-night stand, but let’s analyse it 30 years later in the cold light of day.

What are the arguments for its greatness? Well, it was a technical equivalent of a full broadside from a battleship. It was designed in the mid-Eighties, as Nissan surfed the very peak of the Japanese bubble economy wave, well before it would come crashing onto the rocky shores of the Nineties. Development budgets were huge and rarely audited; this was well before a serious chap in a dark suit called Carlos Ghosn rocked up and reined in his spendthrift R&D teams.

The 300XZ had variable valve timing, twin turbos, multilink suspension all round, the wonderfully named ‘Super-HICAS’ four-wheel steer system, a largely seam-welded shell for better body stiffness, sophisticated instruments (including that outside temperature gizmo) and ultra-cool switchgear, mounted at fingertip reach on the aft edge of the instrument binnacle. In short, all the mod cons. That long hood roofed over the VG30DETT V6 engine – one of the jewels of the Nissan crown, a powertrain engineer’s powertrain. It was beautifully assembled by Nissan’s Shatai subsidiary, specialists in lovingly assembling low-volume cars for decades.

Other pluses? It was a commercial success. Some 164,000 were sold – more than Porsche sold of the rival 944. It sold like hotcakes in the US in particular – the market it was very much aimed at.

And it was properly fast. 296bhp and 280lb ft of torque fired it to 60mph in 6.1 seconds – similar to a 944 Turbo. Its slippery shape meant it would run into the aero laws at 155mph. No slouch, then. On the other hand, it was a handful, handling wise. It could never be described as playful – it felt too wide and it was definitely too heavy (1510kg upwards) and unwieldy to play games with. In those pre-stability control days, it was also a car that could bite – hard.

Oversteer came on hot and heavy, four-wheel steer or nay, and hands that were too fast or too slow to react would result in bad things happening, quickly. In fact, I seem to recall that the car I ragged across Dartmoor would die in combat not long afterwards, at the hands of a couple of Ford engineers who came to borrow it – ironically, to benchmark that snazzy Super-HICAS system…

So: great tech, a sales success, properly fast. Why ‘almost’ great, then, and not simply great? Well, there was something just not cool about it. I can’t really say what – maybe it was the styling, trying just a little too hard, like that guy in the gym admiring his own biceps in the mirror.

I personally still like its looks – even that divisive full-width rear lighting strip that Nissan has happily resurrected for the 400Z: but somehow the 300ZX had just a whiff of the medallion-wearing, Brut-splashing chap of previous decades to succeed in the clean and crisp Nineties. It never quite achieved the effortless cool of the contemporary S13 200SX, or of the 350Z that would replace it.

That said, I still love them. I recently had occasion to drool over Nissan North America’s absolutely box-fresh heritage car, with only a few hundred miles on the clock and original sales brochures still in the door pockets. It still gave me sweaty palms, and took me back to a dark night on Dartmoor nearly 30 years ago…

So, a very cool car, in my opinion. And almost – almost – great.