Nissan GTR vs Audi R8 - Head to Head Video
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Nissan GTR vs Audi R8 - Head to Head Video Details
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NickTheGreek |
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4 Aug 2010, 06:40 AM |
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Tokyo, 2am. Audi's R8 faces its new nemesis, the Nissan GT-R. Join us, and the Stig, for the big fight live
Looks like we've started our own Midnight Club.
Tokyo's infamous nocturnal racers are the Godfathers of 21st century car culture, the most honourable law-breakers you'll ever find. Before YouTube, before Gran Turismo, before the internet, before mobile phone cameras, before mobile phones, we'd all heard about these guys - bankers, lawyers, businessmen, who knows what else - seeking out the double ton on Tokyo's elevated expressways and beyond.
Something to do with the strictures of that over-crowded city and the rigidity of Japanese life led these renegades to decompress in a most spectacular style. The stories - 200mph in an F40 in a tunnel - became legend. Automotive anarchy has never been cooler.
It's also given us cars like the Nissan GT-R. Numerous incarnations later, more than I can remember anyway, the Skyline name has been kicked into touch. It's a shame. You sense that Nissan is slightly ashamed of the fact that all previous Skylines have been steroidal versions of much humbler cars, yet that's one of the things that's always appealed most about them. A pathological obsession with transforming something ordinary into something extraordinary. Very Japanese.
It's a sign of the times, I guess, that Nissan can now go straight to the top table. The obsession is the same; the platform, these days, bespoke. No more tweaked taxi cabs here, guys. We're talking 7min 38sec laps of the Nürburgring now, and hand-built twin-turbo engines with plasma-sprayed 0.15mm cylinder liner bores. Empirical proof of greatness.
'A generation has grown up for whom the veneration is reserved not for Ferrari or Porsche, but for Nissan'
Meanwhile, a new generation has grown up for whom the veneration is reserved not for Ferrari or Porsche, but for Nissan. The latest GT-R is the axis around which this cultural shift pivots. With this car, the Playstation generation finally comes of age. It could be rubbish, this thing, and it would still be a car of the year.
All this information is fizzing and popping around my head as we take on Tokyo tonight. We've been tooling about at ground level for ages, letting the neon and the smells and the general 24/7 weirdness soak into the cars' bodywork. But what's weirder? Twilight-zone Tokyo shimmering and winking at me through the jet lag, or the fact that our supercar showdown was between a Nissan and an Audi?
Ah yes, the Audi. Parked up somewhere in Ginza, Tokyo's shiny commercial centre, it suddenly dawns on me that I've now driven the R8 on three separate continents. In Vegas in January, it just shaded its bigger, brasher cousin, the Lamborghini Gallardo. In September, I got into one not long after scaring myself witless in Porsche's new 911 GT2 and drove home round the M25 in torrential rain.
Inching through a 60-mile tailback on London's heinous orbital, the R8 was sublime: easy to drive, smooth, multi-purpose (good wipers too). The ultimate supercar, in fact. Now, on the other side of the world, it faces the GT-R. The year's other ultimate multi-purpose supercar.
Yet they feel very different, these cars. The GT-R may have shed the name, but traces of the Skyline genealogy remain. This is a big, imposing vehicle. It weighs 1,740kg, despite being made partly of aluminium and using carbon fibre in its under-body aero.
The doors are long and take effort to open. You sit high inside, and before you've even fired it up - via the red starter button - the GT-R communicates solidity. You can feel it in the rim of the steering wheel, in the interior controls. It's not messing. Frankly, it feels like a truck.
The R8 isn't messing either, but has a more traditional performance-car mien: lower, wider, space-age in a Gerry Anderson kind of way. But surprisingly spacious too. It's 200kg lighter than the Nissan, and again, in the absence of a set of industrial scales to verify things, communicates its weight through all the bits you touch on the way in. Doors, seats, wheel, controls: all have a delicacy the Nissan doesn't. Some also have a flimsiness the Nissan doesn't, which is most unusual for an Audi. But then this is a most unusual Audi.
Then there's the way they look. Bar the Alfa Romeo 8C or Aston Vantage, it seems car designers have comprehensively forgotten how to design beautiful cars. Neither the Nissan nor the Audi advance the pure art of the car one iota, though for completely different reasons.
Debate has raged all year in the Top Gear office about the R8's appearance, and there's still no consensus. I rather like it, and it turns heads like nothing else new in 2007, but there's a lingering sense that it's trying just too hard. Which is never cool.
There's no doubt that LEDs are changing contemporary head and tail-light graphics, but the Audi has 210 of the buggers and lights up at night with all the subtlety of a Soho sex shop. Still, not bad at all for your first stab at a supercar.
'The challenge is to build a car that is stable, quiet, comfortable and easy to drive at 192mph'
The GT-R's visuals are almost as promiscuous. On the face of it, about as aerodynamic-looking as the British Library, the Nissan actually cleaves the air with a hugely impressive coefficient of 0.27.
On closer inspection, this car - like the Ferrari Enzo - owes every slash, duct and crease to the ministrations of the wind tunnel. (The best bit is the kink on the C-pillar, which steers air towards the rear wing.) On which basis, it starts to look pretty good - menacing, machined and macho, with strong graphics and a cleverly tapered glass-house (just pretend you've never clapped eyes on a Ferrari 250GT, OK?).
It's also a car you can simply get into and drive. This is important: as chief engineer Kazutoshi Mizuno recently told TG, "Building a 192mph car is not a particularly difficult challenge. The challenge is to build a car that is stable, quiet, comfortable and easy to drive at that speed." Earlier last year, it looked like Audi had nailed the 'everyday' supercar thing with the R8. Now here comes Nissan making even bigger noises about its automotive alchemy.
And there's nowhere better to test ease-of-use than Tokyo after dark. If New York is the city that never sleeps, then Tokyo is rivalling London as the city that never seems to finish its bloody roadworks. Man, this place is busy. A dazzling network of elevated dual carriageways criss-crosses the metropolis like a giant concrete spider's web, but as we leave Ginza, we're immediately stuck fast in a gluey stream of traffic.
At midnight. Gran Turismo creator Polyphony devised the GT-R's 19-screen multi-function display, and while its main purpose is to record lap times, lateral g and telemetry traces, it's also good for twiddling with in a jam.
The GT-R is smooth enough at low speed, although progress is punctuated by heavy-duty clunks and groans from the rear transaxle. It's a good clunking, though. More even than its 3.8-litre twin-turbo V6, the Nissan's transmission is a thing of wonder.
Its twin-clutch (one for the odd gears, the other for the even ones) dual shift gearbox is mounted - along with the centre differentials -in a single rubber-bushed unit, independent of the rest of the car. It helps optimise weight distribution but must have cost a fortune to develop. Its shifts are as fast as hell at high speed, but the 'box handles city stuff brilliantly too. A duality which gives clues to the GT-R's overall genius...
We're heading south out of Tokyo to the Hakone area. It's about 65 miles away, a popular destination for well-heeled city-dwellers who like to recharge in one of the region's many sulphurous spas and springs. Mount Fuji is visible in the middle distance, but obviously we have a different agenda: the Hakone Turnpike marks the start of a road famous amongst the 'drifting' and computer-gaming fraternity. The GT-R is coming home.
It's 1am now. My jet lag has jet lag. We stop to fuel up at some services in God-knows-where. The lighting in here is so bright it could illuminate Wembley. There are pictures on the wall of an attractive Japanese woman stuffing something unattractive into her mouth. We buy some Kitty cakes instead; real cat would probably be more appetising. The bottled water, meanwhile, is called Sweat. Great.
The only thing to do now is drive, and drive fast. They might be different in concept, execution and feel, but this much is true: the R8 and GT-R are both incredible. Japan has already succumbed to the idea of road pricing, so we're sort of horizontally bungee-jumping between toll booths. With zero local knowledge and the night clamping in tight, this is starting to feel like a simulator. Or perhaps a dream. After that David Lynch-directed pit-stop, things suddenly swim back into focus. What follows turns into the most intense drive of the year.
'The GT-R will do a standing quarter mile in 11.7 seconds... and bother the Veyron in a big way'
The GT-R is monstrously good. Three switches on the dash control the transmission (fast or f**k-me fast up and down-shifts, complete with meaty throttle blips), suspension (race, sport or comfort settings) and vehicle dynamics (stability control on or off). To tell you the truth, I forget which configuration I go for in the end. What I do remember is that the road has some rollercoaster dips and rises in it and some vicious mid-corner crests and bumps. Tricky stuff for a car whose Bilstein electronic dampers have to manage a hard-charging 1.7 tonnes.
But the GT-R locks on like a missile. (Polyphony missed a trick not fitting a display for that.) Apparently, it'll do a standing quarter mile in 11.7 seconds, and that feels about right. Seriously, this thing hooks up and accelerates like a Bugatti Veyron. The rapidity of the gearbox's upshifts - the Veyron has a DSG, remember - is one reason; the sheer devastating wallop of the engine is another.
OK, so it's half as powerful, and it's packing 10 fewer cylinders, but I reckon the GT-R could bother the Bugatti in a big way. It even sounds a bit Veyronish: closer to a giant industrial vacuum cleaner than a car, all rush and whoosh. Other impressions? Its body control over these bumps and crests is breathtaking. You just know that this car has been meticulously engineered down to the last tiny grommet.
To put it another way, it's making the R8 look very secondhand indeed. I can see in my mirrors that Germany is struggling to keep up with Japan. When we swap, it's clear that the Audi's 59bhp (414 to 473) power deficit isn't the only reason why. Quattro boss Stephan Reil told me earlier this year that the cost of developing DSG to fit the R8 would have made the project uneconomic, but its 'R-Tronic' system - a flappy paddle automated manual - is massively off-the-pace. Besides which, since when did Nissan have more money to invest than Audi? Developing its version of a transmission pioneered by, er, VW/Audi?
OK, so the R8 is indisputably better with a six-speed manual. But even that wouldn't have spared it a humbling by GT-R on this road. The Nissan simply flattens the undulating stuff like a turbocharged steam-roller, while the R8 demands much more concentration. The Audi bobs and darts, feels more alive and alert. It's like a big, German Elise. Usually benign, it suddenly feels very mid-engined indeed. The GT-R just gets on with the job. Very, very quickly. Awesome brakes, too. It's a deeply impressive car.
We arrive at the Hakone Turnpike at 8am, after just four hours fitful sleep. It's now called the Toyo Tires Turnpike, thanks to a sponsorship deal set up by the road's Australian owner, the vast property and finance conglomerate Macquarie (which also, fact fans, owns and runs our very own M6 toll road. It's the Rupert Murdoch of the highway). We pay and enter. On a hillside car park inscribed with tell-tale tyre burn-out marks, a surprise guest, Japanese Stig, arrives to officiate. It's the final big face-off of the year: GT-R v R8.
If there's a problem with the GT-R, then it's this: like Ferrari's 430 Scuderia and Porsche's Turbo, it's one of those ultra-modern cars that's almost too fast for its own good. Its four-wheel drive system and computer firepower is now so effective, its bespoke Bridgestone rubber - chosen after 3,000 wheel and tyre combinations were assessed - so dizzyingly capable, that trying to find the limit in this thing becomes a form of madness.
Have an accident in a GT-R, and it would be measurable on the Richter scale. Torque is split according to speed, engine revs, load, acceleration, steering input, yaw angle, and wheel slip. The result? I seriously doubt there is a car on the planet that can corner faster or more aggressively than this. On a super-fast, fourth-gear left-hander, it will not be moved.
'The Audi bobs and darts, feels more alive and alert. The GT-R just gets on with the job. Very, very quickly'
On the same corner, the Audi can, and does, move. That's the difference. It's simultaneously less impressive and yet somehow more involving. Strange as it sounds, it's the R8 - a four-wheel drive Audi of all things - that really plugs you into this sort of road, and feeds back what it finds more effectively through the wheel. The GT-R is so fast that it'll already be contemplating the next corner. But what matters more: how quickly you get where you're going or the quality of the experience as you're doing it?
The experience. And that's why the R8 just shades it - because it rewards driver input. In the Nissan, you get the feeling that the car could probably go even faster if it didn't have you, a mere human being, dicking about at the wheel. The GT-R is part car, part Terminator.
And it's no loser. It's a landmark, an engineering masterpiece. It's much faster than the Audi and goes harder generally. And when it lands in the UK in March 2009, it will cost £55,000. A bargain. By then, a lighter V Spec version will have broken cover, too. A future Car of the Year? Don't bet against it.
The R8 is fantastic in a way that will appeal more to true car enthusiasts; lithe, agile, beautifully engineered. It's even got soul,
a remarkable achievement for an Audi.
Jason Barlow
 Source : www.topgear.com |
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Nissan GTR vs Audi R8 - Head to Head 
