Sayonara, R35: Nissan Japan has stopped taking orders for the GT-R

Did you buy Z3 in the end? :D

That’s mostly the AP1 with the 9,0000 rpm rev limit.

Wanna know how I _handle_ it? I check the oil before I drive it and top it up. Perhaps I could swap retainers and banjo bolts but I’m lazy and checking the oil is easy. I pop the hood when I pull into my garage to remind me to check the oil before racing off.

I interpreted it a "regulations bad".

I think it is quite the leap to equate stick vs dct to car vs motorcycle.

How rough they are is dependent on programming. The Getrag DCT I had in my BMW was amazing and beat the ZF-8 on crispiness, speed, and weight.

Where the ZF-8 wins is stop & go traffic. The DCT will do its very best to minimize slip, where the ZF-8 just doesn't lock up the lock-up clutch.

But once you're moving the DCT was butter smooth, with selectable engagement speed.

As long as you're stock or just doing some bolt ons and an E85/FF tune, the DCT is fine. If you're doing big power upgades, you will need to throw in a shep trans kit or something else, but you're gonna need forged con rods before that - you'll bend rods on a stock motor before you'll break the stock DCT.

It's also butter smooth compared to contemporary peer DCTs, like the getrag box that was thrown in the Ferrari 458 and AMG GT, though I personally prefer the feel of being shoved back into your seat at full throttle + highway speeds from the getrag box. It's like you're turning on the warp drive :)

The one exception to the smoothness of Nissan's DCT is slow right hand turns in 1st or 2nd. It seems to not want to upshift as quickly as you'd think it ought to in that situation more often than I would've preferred. But that's more of a minor QoL thing than a real problem, IMO.

A much bigger problem with the R35 is that if it ever gets towed without a flatbed (i.e. rear wheels on road), you grenade most of the drivetrain (including the DCT), and that's like $20k+ in parts before you even start counting labor.

The DCT on the GT-R definitely wasn't as rough around the edges as I anticipated it might be.

It's not a new thing, it's always been a popular choice in the enthusiast community.

What's nice is finally the market is catching up with the manual (again).

It used to be the performance choice.

When the automatics/twin clutches got good in the 2000/2010 era, a lot of performance cars preferred the faster/easier transmission, and the people spending new-car money on performance cars opted for it (or were forced into it).

As with many things, the new-car-money people aren't a cross section of the enthusiast community, they have different preferences. Some want the latest tech, some want their expensive purchase to be easy to drive every day, etc.

But the used market has always valued the manual more highly than the new car market, and the lower-and-lower take rate of the manual in new cars means the values of the manual are stronger than ever. However, I can't remember a time when an automatic or twin clutch pulled more $ on the used market.

I think it's something that's coming about because of the level of performance reached by the average sports car - in prior eras, the actual mechanical challenge of making a car fast meant achieving higher and higher peak performance also required more engagement from the driver, and I think a lot of people implicitly conflated the two. Starting in the 2000s (and this is really where it's interesting to see the perspective here on the R35, because I recall this being a critique of the car at the time), computer-controlled transmissions, AWD, engine tuning, etc. took a lot of that out of the drivers' hands in the service of making the cars just absolutely brutally fast. EVs are the apex of this - the acceleration is ridiculous, the "skateboard" with all the heavy batteries at the bottom does wonders for keeping the cars planted, and the performance these cars can reach is astounding, but... it's boring. So now I think more people are coming around to the idea that sports car driving is not a numbers game - who can be the fastest around the lap - but an actual visceral hobby, something to engage the senses, and in many cases that almost requires the car to not be as fast or as capable as what you can get with more tech in the middle.

God forbid someone just enjoys engaging more of their body in the act of driving. What's next, pillorying retro-computing enthusiasts and accusing them of arrested development because no one legitimately enjoys old & slow computers?

I'm not a car enthusiast, however having driven both manual and automatic cars I just find driving manual cars more fun, and I imagine a lot of enthusiasts do too. I feel more in control of the car, and getting good performance feels like it's taking skill, even in a slower car. I don't think I'd find anything satisfying about driving an automatic, but faster car, in the same way.

It’s not, having driven manuals and automatics around the Nordschleife, automatic feels so uneventful. With manual one is constantly involved. Even paddle shifting is boring.

Shifting manually is fun, that's it for me. It's like playing an arcade game while driving, it's more to do.

Toyota meanwhile have made a point that all the front styling grilles in the Mk5 Supra can be opened up and used to house heat exchangers for tuners.

Nissan simply could’ve never acknowledged it. Instead made a point that the GT-R was untuneable, which to my knowledge, is the only time a car company has claimed such a thing.

Lightning Lap is great and I'm glad C&D does it

You have to read it with some context in mind, though. The Audi RS3 only scores that high because they had a factory option to ship it with 60 Treadwear track day tires.

On the more standard performance tires it dropped to around the ~150 mark on the chart.

Fun car, but I wouldn't put it in the same league for track performance. Put those same 60 Treadwear trackday tires on the GT-R, Mustang, or Supra and they'd all jump up the list too.

Close on performance in a straight line isn't really close on performance.

The Camaro might also be going away (again) soon.

> Camaro ZL1 is close on performance

Are those 4wd ?

> meta: a bit confused about people comparing a muscle car to a japanese sports coupé.

Your concept of a muscle car is probably outdated if you don’t think they play in the same space. The American sports cars are very formidable

> there's more to a car than price and performance benchmarks.

Those of us who actually get on track do care about this stuff. I’d happily drive an ugly tin can from some obscure country if it performed well, was the right price, and was reliable.

The whole muscle car versus imports debate is more for the armchair car enthusiast and people who hang out in parking lots with their hoods up.

I'm confused about what this is trying to say. I assume the Mustang is the "muscle car" and the R35 is the "japanese sports coupe" but in many ways the R35 has been the blunt hammer muscle car of its era.

They're both fantastic cars on the track from all reports. I'm not sure whether you're denigrating the R35 ("just a sports coupe") or the Mustang ("just a muscle car") in that comment.

Also, price and performance benchmarks seem pretty darned important in the worlds these cars play in. We're not talking about minivans or even sport sedans here.

It also could be engineered maintenance.