The Nissan GT-R, King of Mount Panorama
- Finlay Ringer
- Feb 18
- 8 min read
Updated: Feb 19
Nissan's GT-R was once so successful that it changed Australian touring car racing forever...
Last weekend’s action-packed Bathurst 12 Hours saw social media inundated by videos varying from onboards to crashes, and even that shocking incident between a Ford Mustang and a kangaroo. As usual, Mount Panorama provided plenty of spectacular moments for us all to gawp over, but none quite trump the video of Mark Skaife’s limit-defining pole lap for the 1991 Bathurst 1000.
It is, in a word, uncomfortable. The then-fresh faced Australian coaxes his Group A Nissan Skyline R32 GT-R around the technical course with immense speed and precision. There’s a lingering sense of danger as his car brushes walls, shoots flames and makes full use of its all-wheel drive traction to rocket up and over the mountain. The result: a new lap record.
Skaife’s jaw-dropping qualifying run was just one of many highlights in Nissan’s Australian Touring Car Championship (ATCC) campaign.
Revealed in 1989, the R32 GT-R was built with Group A touring car racing in mind. It didn’t take long for it to make waves in Japanese motorsport but, somewhat surprisingly, it had a second life in Australia that would be so successful that it would change Aussie touring car racing forever.
Between 1990 and 1992, it would be the benchmark in the ATCC, much to the chagrin of Holden and Ford.
It’s domestic racing career was enough to secure its ‘legend’ status; it would win its first race in March 1990, and the next one, and the next. In fact, it won every round of the Japanese Touring Car Championship between 1990 and 1993. Between Team Impul and Team Hasemi, the GT-R took four consecutive championship victories in the JTC-1 (Group A) class. It even had victories in major endurance races, taking overall honours at the 1991 Spa 24 Hours.
While it gathered trophies faster than a squirrel in a nut harvester, it made its way into the hands of one of Australia’s most famous racing teams: Gibson Motorsport. Team principal Fred Gibson would campaign the new GT-R for the second half of the 1990 season, replacing the outgoing Skyline HR31 GTS-R.
The GT-R’s journey started when a handful of fully finished GT-R road cars rolled into the Gibson workshop. They were unceremoniously stripped and rebuilt in race trim. Only 100 roadgoing R32 GT-R’s were sold new in Australia, all with a hefty price tag. Gibson’s competition cars - all of which still remain - carry an even greater premium.
The handful of GT-R’s which raced in Australia were different from those that were sweeping podiums back in Japan. Gibson couldn’t afford to source parts straight from Nissan’s motorsports division (Nismo) so used some locally-sourced parts instead.
Gibson, supported by Nissan Australia, also homologated some of its own parts to make sure the GT-R was competitive in Australian racing. The team worked with Nismo engineers back in Japan to redesign major components like the engine block, brakes, wheels and turbochargers. This produced a car which was more powerful and dynamically competent than its Japan-based counterpart.
The GT-R was unreliable early on (it failed to finish its debut race at Mallala, in June 1990), but all of Gibson’s additions would soon pay off once the Skyline’s technical woes were sorted. A fourth place finish in the next round was a positive sign, but the final round of the season at Oran Park was where it truly shone.
The GT-R would take its first win and - with the help of strong results for the HR31 GTS-R that Gibson had campaigned earlier in the year – Nissan’s first Australian Touring Cars championship.
The GT-R was nothing short of a monster on track from that point on. The all-wheel drive coupe produced nearly 650bhp from its 2.6-litre Inline-6. That rose to 700bhp when the boost was turned up for qualifying, meaning the twin-turbo beast was a handful to control. This reputation for speed saw Wheels Magazine give the GT-R its iconic nickname: ‘Godzilla’.
It was fairly heavy at 1,350kg and, according to Mark Skaife, it was a cumbersome car to control. As it was front-engined, the GT-R’s weight balance always favoured the front end; combine this with small tyres and a minimalist aerodynamic package, and it made for an unruly combination. Skaife even claimed that the GT-R would lift in the straights due to the lack of downforce. That being said, its all-wheel drive layout meant it was a precision instrument in the wet, blitzing its rear-driven competition from Ford, BMW and Holden.
The Gibson-built GT-Rs were so fast that Nismo vetoed the Australian outfit’s efforts to race overseas at events like the Fuji 500 in Japan or the touring car race at Macau. With just 500bhp in the Japan-based Skylines, Nissan was concerned that it would be upstaged by the uprated Gibson machines.
Skaife would race in these events overseas with a Japanese GT-R in 1991, but bemoaned the car’s lack of grip and power compared to the Gibson-spec cars.
The 1991 ATCC season started where the GT-R had left off in the previous year. It took a one-two at the first race in Sandown. As if that wasn’t enough to turn heads, Skaife and Australian touring car legend Jim Richards would achieve an identical result at the next four rounds.
The championship was always Nissan’s to lose – the GT-R won seven of the ATCC’s nine rounds, taking a one-two in six of them. A Skyline was on the podium in every race and, of the 425 laps which made up the championship, Nissan led almost 80 percent of them.
Richards would take the ATCC title over Skaife, but the GT-R’s results meant that it was a straight fight between the Nissan duo. Gibson’s rivals could never get close.
It was the same story going into the Bathurst 1000 (known then as the Tooheys 1000) in October of 1991. Mark Skaife’s smashed the lap record in qualifying by more than a second; his mystifying pole record of 2:12.63 was a mark of what was to come. The GT-R was a monster on Mount Panorama, hitting 182mph on Conrod Straight.
The race itself was a doddle for the now-proven Skyline GT-R. The car, shared by Richards and Skaife, took a dominant lead on lap 3 and never had to look back, winning by a lap over the Holden of Win Percy and Allan Grice.
The Nissan duo set another record that weekend, becoming the fastest car ever to complete the Bathurst 1000 with a time of 6 hours, 19 minutes, 14.8 seconds. The record would stand for nearly 20 years.
This success came at a hefty cost; Gibson’s operating budget was huge for the period. It spent over AU$1 million in 1991, putting the team under significant financial pressure. Winfield cigarettes were signed as a sponsor for 1992, giving Gibson a much-needed injection of cash.
Rebranded as Winfield Racing for the ’92 season, the GT-Rs were run with a budget of AU$4 million (a whopping AU$10 million or US$7 million in today’s money), which was unheard of in 1992.
Rival teams expressed interest in racing the GT-R, but none could contend with the cost of running Nissan’s Group A challenger.
The ATCC tried to slow the GT-Rs down for 1992 to make the field more competitive. To Gibson Motorsport’s irritation, it was handed a 150kg weight increase and a reduction in boost bar to drop the peak power to just over 600bhp.
It had some impact, bringing the field closer in terms of results, but the GT-R was still the class of the field. It took a further four victories, and scored a podium in every event. The Ford Sierra RS500 Cosworths, Holden Group A Commodores and BMW M3 Sport Evolutions were taking swipes at the Nissans, but Skaife and Richards still led the championship.
Skaife would take ATCC honours in the handicapped Skyline, carrying momentum into the Bathurst 1000 at the end of the year.
It would be a race marred by controversy. Skaife failed to repeat his qualifying feat of the previous year, lining up on the second row but eventually making his way to the head of the field in a rain-soaked race.
Disaster struck as Skaife careered off the road from the lead, crashing on lap 143 and ending the Winfield team’s race. The Australian was on slick tyres on a wet track at the time. Skaife’s incident brought out a red flag, with the race officials deeming the conditions too treacherous to continue.
Skaife, dejected at having lost the race for his team, headed back to the pits. Unbeknownst to him, the race would be decided by the race order of the last completed lap, which was when Skaife was still leading the race. Controversially, Winfield Racing’s GT-R was handed the victory despite no longer having a functioning car.
Unsurprisingly, spectators and rival teams alike expressed their anger at the ruling, but the result would stand and Nissan would take back-to-back Bathurst 1000 victories.
It would be the brand’s final hurrah in Australian for over 20 years: Group A regulations would be dropped for the 1993 season, ushering in the V8 Supercars which we still see today. Gibson Motorsport would have no choice but to switch to Holden’s for the following season, forcing Nissan to bow out of Australian motorsport.
It would be nearly 20 years until Nissan returned to Australia, joining the V8 Supercars championship with a fleet of Nissan Altima’s in 2013. It competed in the series until 2018, but failed to regain the dominance that the brand had seen in the early 1990s. Nissan took three wins in the team’s lifespan, but no championships or Bathurst 1000 victories, only managing a best position of sixth place at Mount Panorama in 2017.
It was a slightly different story in Bathurst’s other endurance race: the Bathurst 12 Hour. Nissan would take its GT-R NISMO GT3 to victory in 2015. Katsumasa Chiyo would make a heart-stopping last-lap pass to move from third to first, taking one of the most important victories in Nissan’s GT3 programme. The GT-R NISMO GT3 would return to take second place in 2016.
Nissan is one of only three manufacturers that have managed to win both of the mountain’s most famous events, the Bathurst 1000 and the Bathurst 12 Hour. Mercedes and BMW have had impressive streaks at both events, but by far the most dominant of that esteemed bunch has to be Nissan. It commanded that ATCC in that brief period between 1990 and 1992, so much so that it forced the organisers to scrap the regulations entirely to avoid such one-sided results.
The R32 Skyline GT-R has since become a cult icon of the Japanese Domestic Market (JDM), with a huge presence online and an eye-watering price tag to match its fandom. But, for all of the overpowered, highly engineered examples coming out of workshops around the world, Gibson Motorsport’s efforts in Group A is the first example of taking what was already an impressively engineered car from Nissan and turning it into a monster.
Watch Mark Skaife's 1991 Bathurst 1000 pole lap below:
Check out The Sportscar Database's social media channels for more.
Comments