Nissan Finance

NISSAN: REACHING FOR THE SKYLINE

Nobody of a certain age can hear the name Nissan without hearing a faint echo of its previous incarnation, Datsun. In the UK this unfortunately brings to mind some rather forgettable, gawkily styled and flimsy workaday saloons and hatchbacks from the 1970s. But rather amazingly, the company has been going since 1914 and in that time, under one of several names, it has produced some truly tremendous cars, at least some of them going under the Datsun banner – the pretty coupé-styled 240Z was a genuine competitor to the Ford Mustang and Jaguar E-Type, for instance, and nice examples are now highly collectable.

The long-lived Skyline series of high-performance cars is another highlight of the marque; their GT-R variants are rightly revered by keen drivers for race-bred handling and performance. Becoming the first production car to lap the famous Nürburgring track’s Nordschleife in under eight minutes is by no means to be sniffed at, and these impressively quick and handsome cars have a fanatical following.

That GT-R badge has made it way into the modern era too. In 2007 Nissan unveiled their very own supercar, named the GT-R but no longer with the ‘Skyline’ prefix. In other ways, however, it is a direct descendant of the tyre-smoking Nissans of previous years, with its superb attention to detail and a few signature touches such as the distinctive round tail lights of the Skyline series.

However, it has been retooled for the 21st century, and is enormously customisable and upgradeable. You can drive a Nissan GT-R off the showroom floor and, provided your wallet is hefty enough, buy almost every performance part imaginable then enter it into an international race series of your choice. As proof of its modernity, one of the major partners in its dash design were the company responsible for the Gran Turismo series of computer games.

There are also various editions available off the shelf, from the Black Edition to the Nismo N-Attack, which is basically optimised for super-fast laps of the Nürburgring. Handy, should you live in South-Western Germany…

If a Nissan is your kind of performance car we would, of course, be delighted to offer you a suitably flexible, customisable and modern finance package. Get in touch with us for a personal conversation and we will do our best to put you behind the wheel of this extremely distinctive sports car.