We farewell the enduring Nissan R35 GT-R and Audi R8 V10 with one final drive

In the end, they couldn’t be separated.

Three judges plumped for the Nissan GT-R and three cast their votes for the Audi R8 V10. That was MOTOR’s Performance Car of the Year 2009, the first and only occasion that two cars tied for the PCOTY crown.

While we might well question the wisdom of an even number of judges, even prior to that event, the Nissan GT-R and the Audi R8 had always been inextricably wedded.

Now, as they disappear from sale in Australia, we couldn’t miss the opportunity to take these two performance icons for one final sortie into the high country in order to put an end stop on our own history with them and attempt to place their respective legacies into some sort of context.

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I had an unxpectedly early acquaintance with the GT-R. Back in May 2005, somewhere near the Nürburgring, ex-Wheels editor Bill Thomas and I were looking for a place to clean a Nissan 350Z when we chanced upon a country servo with a functioning jetwash. That’s not always easy to find in Rheinland-Pfalz on a Sunday morning due to local noise regulations, so we were a little annoyed to be shooed away by a horde of Nissan employees clearly anxious to hide what was inside the cleaning bay.

A glimpse of the headlight unit confirmed that the silver and black mule inside was the new GT-R, months prior to its appearance in Proto Concept guise at the 2005 Tokyo Motor Show. It was like finding a unicorn.

The introduction to the Audi R8 was more conventional, but no less striking. The international launch for the first 4.2-litre V8 Type 42 car was held on the roads around Circuit Paul Ricard. A colleague had arrived with a Porsche 997 Carrera 4S so that a clandestine comparo could be run on the local hill routes.

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His face afterwards was one of shellshock. The Audi hadn’t just bested the 911. It had demolished it. It was way quicker, sounded better, handled better, looked more striking, felt better screwed together and just contrived to make the Porsche appear a dated also-ran. That was deeply unfamiliar terrain, and felt as if the sports car world had just shifted decisively on its axis.

Weissach attempted to reassert itself against the GT-R with the 997 GT2, the fastest and most powerful road-going 911 to date, only for the somewhat porky production version of Nissan’s R35 GT-R to eclipse its time on hometown title Auto Zeitung’s test track. The 997 was again made to look second best.

Of course, with hindsight, we can see the subsequent development timeline, Porsche making good with the excellent 991 generation and now the 992 evolution has once again stamped Zuffenhausen’s superiority on its class, which only serves to render the achievement of the Nissan R35 GT-R and the Audi R8 all the more jaw-dropping.

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But, alas, unless you’re talking bottomless crab buffets, all good things come to an end. Australian Design Rule 85 and its requirement for additional side impact protection has done for the R35 GT-R while Audi’s Hungarian engine plant will no longer build the Aussie-spec 5.2-litre V10, the mothership at Ingolstadt not seeing any compelling numbers that would convince them of the cost benefit to homologate the car with a new engine specification. So it’s auf wiedersehen to the Audi, at least until the next generation model arrives.

What that car will look like is open to question. What it sounds like isn’t. Instead of using Porsche’s now-abandoned SPE modular and scalable platform, the next R8 will instead lean ever further on Lamborghini, so in 2025 we ought to see the R8 sharing body and chassis structures from the front to the B-posts with the next-gen Huracan. In place of the brand-new hybridised V8, Audi looks set to instal a T-shaped 90kWh battery stack and two or three e-motors. On the plus side, you’ll get more than 635kW to play with, but that yowling V10 will, sadly, be a thing of the past.

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As indeed will a Nissan GT-R with an internal combustion engine, but not just yet. It’s likely that Nissan will unveil an updated R36 version of its performance flagship which will continue to drink 98RON, with Nissan having experimented with both a kinetic energy recovery system and 48v mild-hybrid power. That car is seen as a stepping stone to a more radical fully electrified R37 version that will appear towards the end of this decade.

The GT-R initially feels resolutely of its time. There’s that giddy impression of ‘new old stock’ about this Millennium Jade T-Spec version, as if you’ve stumbled upon a 15-year-old barn find with delivery kilometres. Even the key feels like a period piece, being pretty much the same fob you’d get with a $25k Juke, but fire the engine up, let that trademark starter clatter settle and you can’t help but grin and realise that you’re in for a singularly memorable driving experience.

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The most disorientating thing about the GT-R is the disconnect between what you’re seeing and how well it actually drives. The Super Nintendo-style infotainment screen, the manual handbrake, the riotous clash of fonts and textures lulls you into thinking you’re in for a somewhat period driving experience, that the game has moved a long way over the horizon.

You’ll search in vain for modern features like smartphone mirroring, a head-up display or a wireless charging pad, and the reversing camera appears to have the definition of a Goldfinger-era buttonhole spy camera. Indeed, the way the 419kW VR38DETT powerplant only really starts to get its trousers on at 3000rpm is a throwback. As is the GT-R’s hydraulically assisted steering, which tramlines and constantly jinks and chatters. But stick with it.

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There’s a good deal of compliance in the way this T-Spec rides in Comfort mode. The received wisdom that the R35 rides like a trolley jack couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, there’s a delightful long-stroke cadence to the ride, especially when you’re just wallowing in the 632Nm available at 3300rpm.

You don’t need to redline the GT-R in order to cover ground quickly and effortlessly. Using the stubby wheel-mounted paddles to shortshift up at around 5500rpm reinserts you into the fattest part of the torque band without having to work the twin IHI turbochargers too mercilessly.

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The driveline lash of old has been notably quelled in later R35 iterations, but the chassis now feels a step behind in terms of torsional rigidity, lacking the Nismo model’s seam-welded shell.

Don’t believe the figure of 50,000Nm/deg bandied about for the GT-R – that’s for certain subassemblies only. By way of comparison, the R8’s chassis twists by one degree when 40,000Nm is applied.

Dial the pace back a bit and there’s still a lot to take in. Tyre roar is so great if almost feels as if Nissan has programmed a coarse chip sound symposer to fill the cabin with low frequency white noise. You sit high in the car and headroom isn’t great, but your coif scuffs gently on a beautiful Alcantara headlining with some quite ornate diamond stitching.

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The seat height combines with the fact that the highest part of the GT-R’s roofline is at the windscreen header rail, the aero blade canopy arcing downwards to the ‘sword-edge’ C-pillar.

Remember the fuss we made about the GT-R tipping the scales as if it was sculpted from a billet of depleted uranium? This T-Spec weighs 1751kg, slotting neatly between all-wheel drive, six-pot coupe rivals the Porsche 911 Turbo and the BMW M4 xDrive.

Fling it into a corner and you can feel that mass, but it’s possible to neutralise the feeling of heft with a stab of throttle. The steering wheel is near-perfectly proportioned, bereft of the thuggish circumference of many latter-day rivals, and the front Dunlop SP Sport Maxx rubber feels supremely keyed into the bitumen. Lean hard on the Brembo ceramic brakes (390mm front, 380mm rear) on turn-in and you can feel the car swing to neutrality, the drive logic then attempting to figure out how much rear bias is going to be sufficient on corner exit.

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Despite the great – and deserted – roads, this isn’t really a day for hard driving.

It’s a chance for us to consider how this car, once hailed as some sort of self-driving Gundam automaton, now offers a more analogue feel than virtually any rival. And given that speculators have ramped values of these T-Spec cars up to almost a million dollars, I’m a little conscious about getting it back to Nissan in one piece.

The Audi is a car that might give seasoned MOTOR readers an element of déjà vu. This very same R8 Performance coupe was featured in the March 2021 issue as part of our Car of the Year event and has some miles under its belt. In fact, it covered more laps of Winton than any other car at PCOTY, which speaks volumes as to how popular it was with judges. Only tired brakes and contact patches like crêpes called a halt to proceedings.

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Balancing that blend of the exotic and the prosaic is what makes the R8 such an intriguing proposition. On the one hand it’s a V10 mid-engined junior supercar that has a fair amount of Sant’Agata in its chromosomes, yet for the most part it’s as undemanding to drive, and indeed live with, as a scaled-up TT.

It has also benefited from an extensive mid-life update when the original Type 42 model morphed into the 4S model nine years after launch in 2015, at which point the V8 engine and the gated manual gearbox were quietly pensioned off.

There’s a school of thought that says that the V8 is the sweeter engine, better suited to the character of the R8. While it is a lovely thing, the eight-pot needs to be worked harder to feel quick. Look at the comparative dyno plots for the two engines and the V10 actually needs more revs to make its peak torque, but the fact remains that at 4000rpm the V8 makes 250Nm, whereas the 10-cylinder engine is already delivering 28 per cent more shove, some 320Nm. And it sounds more exciting, too.

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This second-gen R8 was updated in 2018, with the V10 plus becoming the V10 performance quattro, power creeping up by 7kW to 456kW in the process.

Where the Nissan hefts a power-to-weight figure of 239kW/tonne, the Audi muscles in with a hale and hearty 281kW/tonne. That’s still quite something when a current Porsche 992 GT3 makes 261kW/tonne.

The R8’s polish and civility makes it easy to underestimate. Get after it and the ferocity of the V10 remains something to behold.

It’s also something that can almost be too much. Accelerating the Audi to redline reminded me of once climbing a route in the French Alps that ran up the side of a roaring waterfall. It wasn’t a technically demanding pitch, but the closer you got to the din of the water, the more your adrenaline would spike.

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You’d end up shaky and juiced in no time at all, primarily due to the noise. It’s the same chasing the V10 around the dial. You become so bathed in stress hormones that there comes a time when you just need to snick up out of the power early to give yourself some respite.

And now this V10 is the last one standing. When the R8 V10 first appeared, you could also get a 10-pot in a Chrysler Viper, a Lamborghini Gallardo, a Porsche Carrera GT, BMW’s M5 and M6 and even in Ford trucks and Volkswagen SUVs.

Lexus’s awesome LFA with its 1LR-GUE powerplant followed in 2009, but by then the V10 had been erased from the F1 playbook and as a result its cachet dimmed. Lamborghini will likely be the last to persist with this engine configuration, and being the last to persist with anything rarely smacks of dynamic innovation. Maurizio Reggiani would doubtless disagree.

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It’s a fact that this Audi wouldn’t hold station with a V6-engined Maserati MC20. I’d wager it would languish some way behind a V6-engined McLaren Artura or the six-pot Ferrari 296 GTB. Their sixes weigh around 160kg, the weight of a passenger less than the Audi’s mill. Dressed with turbochargers and, in the case of the Artura and 296GTB, battery assistance and they deliver a power density that’s in another league.

But then so does a Tesla Model 3 Performance and you wouldn’t take one of those into the hills at dawn and revel in an aural palette of such astonishing richness. It’s hugely indulgent, utterly unsustainable and borderline antisocial, but the R8’s V10 delivers such a reward for the keen driver that it feels depressingly predictable that something this good is being slowly legislated out of existence. Experience one while you still can.

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Even today, it’s hard to pick a favourite. The Nissan is warmly received everywhere it goes, offers a genuine and discrete charisma even if you’re not a GT-R otaku, and has weathered the demands of time in a curiously endearing fashion.

The Audi initially feels a little more modern-generic right up until that moment when it doesn’t. It flatters and coddles and then drenches you with its sheer sonic intensity. Both are something to be treasured and each, in its own way, has left an indelible mark on the performance car landscape.

Alex Affat takes the keys to the Nissan and heads back towards Melbourne. From my vantage point I can track the characteristic rear lights jinking through the trees as the car snakes down the hill towards Marysville. Then it’s gone, perhaps for good.

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This could well be my last ever drive in an Audi R8 too. I’m not ashamed to say that the last drive was a long one, heading down Reefton Spur and back up again, returning to the top of Lake Mountain as the sun set over the hills.

Despite dwindling sales that point to an inevitable conclusion, I don’t feel that the Nissan GT-R or the Audi R8 ever outstayed their welcomes. Perhaps familiarity bred complacency rather than contempt; a feeling that they’d always be there regardless of our patronage.

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Audi demonstrated that a hand-made supercar could punch well beyond the weight of its niche. Nissan understood the value of both a gold-standard competition history and creators who are, and remain, genuine enthusiasts. Both moved the meter. Both will be missed.

And then, just like that, the lights blinked out for both.

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Fast Facts

1. Make the Grade

Back when MOTOR had these two cars at PCOTY 2009, the Nissan retailed at $155,000 and the Audi was a hefty $351,000. Today, the Audi is 12.5 per cent more expensive whereas the Nissan is a massive 65.6 per cent pricier.

True, neither are entry grade, but it’s still quite an eye-opener

2. The Lambo Link

So how much of the R8 is common with the Lamborghini Huracan? Both chassis come from Audi at Neckarsulm and both engines from the plant at Gyor in Hungary. Despite both cars looking and feeling very different it’s estimated that there is still around a 70 per cent parts commonality

3. High Top Jade

Millennium Jade made its debut in 2002 on V-Spec II Nür and M-spec Nür variants of the R34 GT-R. Some 718 V-Spec IIs and 285 luxurious M-Specs saw out R34 GT-R production with gold engine covers (specifically finished in EY0 Silica Breathe). Lift the bonnet of the new GT-R T-Spec, and it’s replicated here

Technical specs