Tokyo: All eyes on the GT-R

Posted by Paul Horrell at 12:15PM on Thursday 25 October, 2007 0 Comments

NIssan GT-R Someone at the Tokyo show asked how the heck it took six years to get the new GT-R finished.

Well, look at how long it takes Porsche to do a new 911, and pretty much every 911 has been an evolution of the last one. So it doesn't seem ever so long to me because Nissan started from scratch.

More interesting is that around the same time as the GT-R project was kicked off, we heard that Toyota/Lexus and Honda/Acura would have supercars too. The Lexus LF-A is at the Tokyo show, but only as the same concept we've seen loads of times before. Of the real thing still no sign. What are they doing?

And over at Honda, there was such a ruckus about the dreary design of the new NSX show car (the Acura Advanced Sports Car Concept) that they¹ve had another go, so it's absent from today's show.

Besides, the efficiency goals for the V10-engined, rear-drive car are still giving Honda's engineers sleepless nights. And one more slight problem: the Honda boss said he'd launch the car when the F1 car started winning.

He's since changed his tune on that.

So Nissan has won a slow race with its fast car.

And the GT-R is no question the car of the Tokyo show (even if the Mazda Taiki is the most knee-tremblingly gorgeous concept and the main show theme is once again CO2.)

The GT-R is getting swamped in attention. One after another, film crews consisting of manga-looking Japanese presenters take their turn to do homage-like pieces to camera.

People are poring over the technical cutaway models. The video wall of it in action is causing eyestrain to thousands. As Bill Thomas said, the actual unveiling was a complete madhouse. There are new GT-R books on sale in Japan already.

Yet if you walk only a few yards from the Nissan stand, you can stumble on the all-new Subaru Impreza WRX STi, and the all-new Mitsubishi Evo X.

The WRX and Evo used to be just as much of a cult as the old Skyline GT-R, but today no-one seems to be paying them the slightest bit of attention.

Click here to watch the video