Nissan’s new Juke-R 2.0 charges up Goodwood hillclimb

What is dark, angrier looking than a jabbed wasp nest, and bullet-fast up Lord March’s driveway?

Judging by footage below from the weekend’s Goodwood Festival of Speed, we’d say the answer is Nissan’s recently revealed Juke-R 2.0 concept.

Serving as a successor to the original 2011 Juke-R, where Nissan dropped the Juke’s body on the guts of a GT-R, the new Juke-R 2.0 was unleashed at the Goodwood FoS hill climb to celebrate five years of the road model.

But don’t let its ‘2.0’ fool you. The new mutant Juke is everything its predecessor was and more, featuring a redesigned exterior – parts of which are carbon fibre – and new power from its Nismo (!) GT-R drivetrain.

At its core is the twin-turbo 3.8-litre V6 from the 2014 Nismo GT-R, which means GT3-spec turbochargers help it flex 447kW worth of muscle, or 85kW more than the old car, harnessed by the Nismo’s all-wheel drive layout.

Needing to feed and cool its monstrous heart, Nissan has performed significant face surgery on the Juke R 2.0, enlarging its front bumper’s cooling intakes and repositioning the bonnet’s ‘exhaust cowlings’.

Lights front and rear are borrowed from the updated road-going 2015 Juke, as are the fenders, however the side sills that bridge the huge wheel flares are redesigned and also carbon fibre.

Performance wise, all of this translated to a 57.21sec sprint up Goodwood’s hillclimb course with Jann Mardenborough at the tiller, almost eight seconds slower than the actual Nismo GT-R managed in 2014, and 10 seconds afar from Alex Buncombe in Nissan’s GT-R GT3 car. However, Nissan UK claims that the 57.21sec run would place the Juke third place in this year’s supercar class if it weren’t a concept.

While the car’s not for sale, Nissan didn’t mind selling a few of the original Juke-R to supercar collectors at a hefty price. And time will reveal if the Juke-R 2.0’s frightful performance will have the same sort of people again swinging fistfuls of cash for their own road-going monster Juke.

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