We can already hear the questions: “Wait a minute…the R34 isn’t street-legal for the U.S. market. How is there one in Canada?” and “It’s a Japanese car, who cares?” and even better, “Fast And Furious crap. Get it off the page!” The Nissan Skyline is a bit of a polarizing car. It is the forbidden fruit, the one we can’t have until 2023 at the earliest, thanks to the United States Goverment’s 25-year importation law. Our friends across the border in Canada have it a bit easier, with the regulation requiring vehicles to be fifteen years old or older. That means that the R34 Skyline is legal to enter the Great White North.
If you haven’t been paying attention since at least 1997, the Nissan Skyline is one sincere badass. No matter how much the Fast and Furious movie franchise tried to prove otherwise, this is not a “ricey” car. This is a legitimate, no bullshit contender in any race you can throw at it. The 2.6L RB26DETT twin-turbo inline-six. Rated at 276hp@6800RPM from the factory, you can pretty much ignore that rating because it’s as bogus as Chevrolet’s claim of 290 horsepower (gross) for the 1969 Z/28’s 302ci V8 (which, in reality, was pushing 376 horsepower (gross)). The RB26DETT can take modifications like any V8 you can dream up and it responds beautifully to forced induction. That’s why when you played Grand Turismo with your kid, he whipped your ass with a Skyline GT-R while your fourth-gen Z28 was barely making headway.
The guys at Roads Untraveled got their hands on one of the first, and one of the baddest, R34s that is legal in Canada and got to take it for a spin. How does it do? Well, well enough to alert the British Columbia RCMP. Whoops…
meanwhile, in `straya, http://www.gumtree.com.au/s-ad/salisbury-heights/cars-vans-utes/1993-nissan-skyline-turbo-manual-please-read-whole-ad-/1084114522 you can score one needing a bit of work for 4 or 5 grand and a good one around 10 – 11 k….common as muck over here….along with Silvia’s, 180SX’s, Celica’s you name it.
I managed to see one of these cars in person on my 2010 deployment, it was outside of a Japanese auto parts store, my friend who I was with pointed it out to me.
On my wish list