I’m still standing: the Nissan GT-R at 15

Not that either version is exactly a smash hit any more. In its first full year on sale (2009), almost 2000 examples of the GT-R found homes in Europe. In 2019, the last year when sales were unaffected by the pandemic or the chip crisis, it was down to 389. That’s fewer than nine GT-Rs of all varieties per country per year. I expect the Nismo is priced this way because the volumes are immaterial and if you’re going to have a pinnacle product, you might as well price it accordingly.

But it’s still nearly £50,000 more than a brand-new 992-series Porsche 911 GT3. It also costs £15,000 more than the yet more potent, very new and no less practical 911 Turbo S. It’s probably going to cost about the same as the new McLaren Artura. So if you’re going to buy one, it won’t be because it stacks up best on paper; there will have to be some other reason. And it’s my job to find it.

The car Nissan has supplied is a 2020-model-year machine – not that this makes any difference here. Compared with the basic GT-R, it has that additional power, better turbochargers, ceramic brake discs and carbonfibre panels, seats, wings and splitters. It is, to use the vernacular, a weapon. But so is a trebuchet, and that particular meansof lobbing rocks at the enemy went out of fashion almost exactly 500 years ago.

I’ve never been a Godzilla disciple. When it first came over here and all my colleagues were exploding in paroxysms of purple prose, mine was the small, somewhat baffled voice at the back of the room saying: “I don’t understand.” What I didn’t understand was what was so wonderful about this new machine that made it somehow better than the already apocalyptically quick, massively lighter, more agile and far more practical Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution FQ-Nutter that you could buy for half the money. I’m not sure I ever got a decent answer to that one.

But that was then and this is now. And now it feels like I should really be testing it for Classic & Sports Car’s ‘future classic’ slot. If it looks old on the outside (and it does), take a look in the cabin. The current F1 champion was nine years old in the year the GT-R came out, and boy does it show. The cockpit is a not-so-artfully crafted mess.