Behind every great track car is a rusty trailer…even if you are lucky enough to own a Nismo Z-Tune!
For the uninitiated, the Z-Tune was the ultimate factory evolution of the R34 GT-R. Envisaged as a final hurrah for the Skyline GT-R bloodline (which would later be reborn simply as the ‘GTR’), it used a bored, strengthened and balanced motorsport block known as the ‘Z2’ to increase displacement to 2.8L and provide 500bhp courtesy of revised turbochargers.
Only 19 Z-Tune’s were produced in all, and were hand built by Nismo engineers using customer cars with less than 18,000 miles on the clock. Each car was stripped back to the bare chassis before being comprehensively reinforced and redesigned in key areas to create the ultimate road going GT-R. The amount of changes is simply too long to list here – it would need an article in its own right!
Is the car pictured a real Z-Tune? It’s hard to say – it certainly isn’t wearing the exclusive ‘Z-Tune Silver’ paint it left the factory with, and a lot of Z-Tune replica parts find their way onto ‘normal’ GT-R’s, but regardless of it’s provenance, this R34 looks ready to hit the track…
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