Find a decent stretch of touge, a Group A-inspired R32 Nissan Skyline GT-R, and don’t forget the camera batteries. It’s a standard formula guaranteed to appease the Instagram algorithm. Just remember the batteries…

I’d probably forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on, most of the time. But this time, I was prepared. The four-hour drive from Kanagawa to Mie to meet Masayuki Kani and his family cast enough weight to ensure I triple-checked my camera bag.

As I stopped halfway for coffee, cakes, and a quick yoga stretch to unbind my lower vertebrae, my inbox pinged with a message from Masayuki-san. “It’s snowing at our shoot location. Only a millimetre, so it should be fine.” Just a flurry, then. Nothing as troublesome as the roadworks blocking the Honda Civic specialist tuning shop I had originally booked to feature…

However, by the time I met Masayuki-san at the service station, which had cars lined up down the street waiting to fill up, the flurry had turned into a full-blown snowstorm. It felt like this might be my last shoot before the world ended. Better make it a good one…

Masayuki-san’s wife, Erika, had come along for the drive, as did their two young sons, five and three, their little faces pressed against the rear windows to get a better look at the strange foreigner snapping photos of their dad’s car.

This Skyline is a family affair in more ways than one. You see, Masayuki-san was once the kid in the back seat. His father drove an R32 and R34, so to little Masayuki-san, he must have seemed like JTCC legend Masahiro Hasemi.

From 1998 to 2003, father and son would make pilgrimages to Fuji Speedway, Suzuka, and Okayama to watch GT-Rs dominate the JGTC competition. Of course, by then, the R33 Skyline GT-R was on the grid, its predecessor having retired in ’95. But Masayuki-san’s father had witnessed the R32’s consecutive wins from ’90 to ’93, well before his son could even say ‘901 Movement.’

If there was ever a real-life example of ‘win on Sunday, sell on Monday,’ this one for the Nismo marketing department would’ve brought a tear to Nissan’s 901 Movement project leader Yutaka Kume’s eye.

In 1998, Masayuki-san’s father gifted him his HCR32, and soon after, a BNR32 appeared in the driveway. An R34 followed, but when a family crisis forced its sale, both father and son were heartbroken. The loss of his father’s cars was ultimately the catalyst for Masayuki-san to purchase his own R32.

In 2020, Masayuki-san’s father sadly passed away, leaving Masayuki with a deep regret – he never got the chance to buy back the R34. In a way, it feels like Masayuki-san’s car has become a tangible connection to his late father, and the joy of driving such an iconic machine is something which can be passed down from generation to generation.

The BNR34 may be ‘peak GT-R’ for many, but the R32 Skyline GT-R will forever be known as the Japanese monster that conquered Group A touring car racing.

Masayuki-san’s R32 pays homage to the Group A Skylines of the late ’80s and early ’90s with an RB26DETT fully built with an N1 24U block and a REINIK RB-X GT2 engine kit featuring a forged crankshaft, connecting rods, pistons, and a metal head gasket. It’s the same 2.8L setup Nissan Koki developed for the Group A machines.

Unlike Jun-san’s Group A-inspired GT-R that I featured a while back, Masayuki-san has stayed true to the competition cars by keeping the twin-turbo setup intact, with a priceless cast aluminium REINIK intake being one of the engine bay highlights.

The engine was built by Hitoshi Maeda at J.ing Techno Engineering. Maeda-san worked as a Group A rally mechanic and collaborated with REINIK to develop a prototype V12 engine for F1 in the mid-’90s, so Masayuki-san couldn’t have found a better person for the job outside of REINIK itself. That company, now trading as REIMAX, will still build you an engine, for the price of a small planet.

An M600 from MoTeC, a brand that has long been synonymous with Group A race cars, gives the firing orders. With 660ps and 69kg/m, the engine’s power and torque numbers are comparable with Group A GT-Rs too. That output is transferred through the stock BNR32 5-speed transmission via an ORC twin-plate clutch and through to Cusco LSDs front and rear.

Driving through a snowstorm wasn’t exactly what I had planned for this shoot; I had hoped we could take the car on some twisty mountain passes and let the horses run wild. A gallop to pay respect to circuits like Bathurst and Suzuka, where the Skyline GT-R became a motorsport icon.

But in a way, I’m glad the snow fell on Mie that day. It slowed time to a heartbeat, and the beautiful silence was broken only by the roar of a side-piped Group A homage.

Toby Thyer
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