New car news

19 December 2008 - 14:00

Untunable, eh?

Nissan did everything it could to make the GT-R ‘untunable’, but the modifiers were always going to figure out a way around it.

Here’s Cobra Technology’s shot at beefing up Nissan’s stunning supercar and – if you can stomach the matte-black-plus-yellow-pinstripe livery (which we rather like… there’s a bit of Gold Leaf Lotus 49 about it, no?) – it’s a pretty good effort.

This is the ‘Stage One’ package, which boosts power from around 470bhp to a whopping 550bhp thanks to extra boost pressure, a fresh ECU and a bigger stainless steel exhaust system.

It’ll manage 60mph in 3.5 seconds and top out at 199mph… plenty quick enough, you’d think. But Cobra is planning a ‘performance version’ (500bhp being the ‘gently tooling around version’, we assume) that’ll develop 620bhp and 590lb ft of torque. Yowzer.

You can have your interior in two flavours – lots o’ leather or lots o’ carbon fibre – while Cobra has uprated the brakes and suspension to stop you turning your tuned GT-R into an Armco-flecked wreck.

Nice as the Cobra GT-R is, we’ll hold out for Nissan’s official V-Spec version: the lightweight, stripped out GT-R that’s been spotted mullering literally everything around the Nurburgring…