Everybody Underestimates the Nissan Z NISMO
Across a week of driving during our Performance Car Of The Year test, only one person stopped to look over Nissan's Nismo Z. Tentatively he eased his slammed 350Z onto the dirt pull-out across the road from us on this mountain highway, him still in his shop clothes working as a mechanic in nearby Boonville. You know we were in the middle of nowhere. Nothing is near Boonville.
He walked past the Ferrari and the Porsche and the BAC Mono, the Corvette E-Ray, and the Safari Lamborghini. He wanted to see if we liked the new Nismo version of his beloved coupe. A full day of road driving and two at Thunderhill behind us, we gave an answer we ourselves didn’t expect: Yeah, this car is great.
It certainly didn’t make a great impression, looking more than a little apologetic in a rather flat shade of gray. Even the 911 got a fun color this year, and this Nismo looked dressed for a funeral. Was it really good enough for PCOTY? Watching it putter around for our initial sunset group shot, we conferred. It’s too expensive. It doesn’t make enough power. It doesn’t have a manual transmission.
(We wisely shoot all the cars together right off the bat… you never know what cars won’t make it to the end of the last day.)
Even as we all watched our freshly imported British driver, Jethro Bovingdon, run the car for its timed laps in the morning, we didn’t quite understand the Nismo Z. Its 3.0-liter twin-turbo V-6 might make big power—420 hp at 6400 rpm and a beefy 384 lb-ft down at 2000—but it doesn’t exactly sound like it. I swear there are louder minivans.
I myself also didn’t run to grab the keys for it. I was desperate to drive the Acura Integra Type S we brought out. I was curious if the BMW M2 redeemed its exterior styling on track. I wanted to know how weird a hybrid Corvette turned out. A Z that’s a little bit faster for an extra $20 grand? I’ve already driven a Z. How different could it be?
In the driver’s seat, too, not much seems different. That turned out to be a good thing. The steering wheel, all-but lifted from the inimitable R32 Skyline GT-R, is perfectly sized, perfectly weighted. The whole car is like that. The buckets are just right. The pedals are expertly placed. The size of the car is perfect, not too big and burly like the Mustang, not too puny, either.
And hardly a lap in I found myself catching little slides in the Z. Second gear, third gear around Thunderhill, its balance is so easy to read. It’s not a mean car at all. If you want to shred your rear tires, go right ahead. It wasn’t the only car at the test like that pitched sideways whenever asked, but I found myself going back to the Z for seconds and didn’t rush back to the BMW. I wanted to see if I could get more out of the Z.
It’s not the lightest car in the test, but it doesn’t drive heavy. At 3704 lbs, this Zismo weighs almost the same as the M2 and (weirdly) the Lamborghini Huracan Sterrato, but is a few hundred pounds lighter than the Mustang Dark Horse and a few hundred heavier than our 911 T.
In time, the Nismo Z's individual qualities stood out. The engine delivers its power linearly, despite all that boost. Nothing in the car feels out of balance, its long hood stretching out far beyond the Z's driver. The Z sort of disappeared around me. I just wanted to lap and lap and lap until the tires were spent.
I was surprised. Then I snuck a look at all the other notes all of my coworkers were taking down about this thing.
“Came in with no expectations and I actually loved it,” Brian Silvestro wrote. “It’s fast, balanced, and very fun. Steering and front end are delightful, with a strong, predictable rear. It’s essentially a different car than the normal Z. So much more modern and composed.”
Bovingdon, the fastest driver there, was equally taken. “I’ve never driven the standard Z and having read some pretty negative reviews had very low expectations of the NISMO. Surely a 20bhp bump and a few suspension tweaks couldn’t be transformative? Well, it seems that maybe they are.”
Only one person had driven this car before, and that was Editor-at-Large Matt Farah, who drove it at the launch. He liked it better this go around, with more seat time. “This is such a good feel car. The Corvette and the M2 are probably a bit quicker and the Dark Horse is stickier, but this car feels great.”
“It’s the right size for a sports car,” he continued, “and might have the best steering south of the Ferrari.”
Even Aaron Brown, our resident feinshmecker, was impressed. “Pretty damn good. Better than any Supra I’ve ever driven.”
It is at this point in this triumphant narrative that I must include a brief digression. If there’s anything I’ve glossed over in this article, it’s the transmission, which everyone derided.
“I wouldn’t mind this being an automatic if it was a better automatic,” as our Reviews Editor Mack Hogan put it. Brown was more terse. “Trans is hateful.”
I myself wouldn’t go that far, but we all agreed that while a manual might not make the car any faster, it’d be more fun.
I can see why Nissan would equip an automatic from a purely empirical point of view, but having driven this thing, I'm not sure it was the right move. This car is so rewarding to drive, so satisfying, and everything about it is so oriented towards quality over quantity that it seems disjointed to miss a third pedal. The Zismo simply doesn’t drive like a hard-as-nails lap time crusher. It’s a sports car in a classical sense.
On the road, any worry about the paddle shifters faded away. Coming down from a long mountain run on rough, narrow pavement, our line of cars filed into the flat, straight two-lanes of the Central Valley. I grew up a few hours south of here, where it’s all flat, alfalfa and tomatoes stretching to horizon. When I went back East for college, I would sketch roads like this in the margins of my notebooks. Along the blacktop I’d dot these same telephone poles, and more often than not I’d sketch some Seventies two-door Skyline or Z car tearing past them. Funny that I always drew the car facing the mountains, not coming down from them.
I looked ahead of me to see the Sutter Buttes rising up over endless walnut orchards. The Zismo wasn’t so much a car as a low-flying plane, always in boost, ceaselessly powerful. For a moment, every other machine we brought out seemed extraneous, overdone. For all my doubts, it had drawn me in.
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