We had the best drivers and the best team, and the car was a good car. Ultimately they walked away from it because of the cost of doing it, even compared with a Sierra Cosworth RS500.” “Fred was successful, of course, with the GIO car which ran under him, but the rest of the people – and I mean oil company-sponsored teams – actually knocked on my door and asked us if they could be part of GT-R. There wasn’t enough money in it for those team owners plus the development costs. “And, motorsport being what it is, those people always believed they’d get second-rate service because Fred would be the works team and the rest would get hand-me-downs. They said they were happy to supply through Gibson Motorsport. “Two things killed that (customer cars) – one was the budget required, and the second was that they would have to deal through Fred because Nismo didn’t want to deal with independent teams in Australia. “When people realised the GT-R was going to be the gun car, they knocked on our door and wanted to run GT-Rs – until we told them the budget,” he recalls. “We were lucky to have cigarette money come along because it was a very expensive car to run.” “We were struggling when we first did GT-R because we didn’t have enough money to do the job properly,” Gibson reveals. More than a quarter of a century later, that’s a figure most Supercars teams would envy. We’d always had Fred to do what we needed to.”īy 1992, even Nissan Australia was baulking at the cost and Winfield came on board as sponsor, boosting the factory’s $1 million contribution to a $4 million annual budget. All the cars were raced with Nismo parts, so it was a closed shop, whereas in Australia, we’d never looked at it that way. “The problem was that Nismo owned the Group A series in Japan. We had to show them actual receipts to prove the big difference in cost. The Japanese (management) in Australia wanted to know why we weren’t using NISMO parts. ![]() And that caused some angst between us and the Japanese. But, contrary to popular opinion, the GT-R was a monster to drive.īeranger: “We had no alternative (than to do local development) because we would’ve gone broke quicker if we hadn’t done that. Ford folk hero Dick Johnson and his Sierras, the factory backed BMWs and Holden’s game Group A Commodore were eaten alive by Godzilla. V8 legends Richards and Skaife, guided by acclaimed Nissan team boss Fred Gibson, established the GT-R in Australian motor racing folklore – and infamy – by overwhelming the opposition in ’91/92. That enmity resulted in Jim Richards’ immortal line “You’re a bunch of arseholes” to the baying audience as he celebrated his and Mark Skaife’s flood-shortened victory at Bathurst in 1992. Local fans hated the GT-R and rivals resented it. Rarely has such a great race car been so vilified. No more homologation specials, no more all-singing, all-dancing production-based racers. In two years, the car dubbed ‘Godzilla’ – an Aussie sobriquet that went viral globally before the internet era – changed the face of touring car racing forever. You can thank the R32 for what became Supercars. In Australia, the devastation – and stultification – was so complete, the R32 racer begat the return of all-Australian V8 Holden versus Ford rivalry on track. ![]() ![]() Worldwide, homologation icons like the Ford Sierra Cosworth RS500 and BMW M3 Evo just couldn’t compete against the Japanese all-wheel-drive wonder. It was so good, so technically advanced, it killed the category. Nearly 30 years ago, the Group A racing version of the R32 Nissan GT-R was as close to unbeatable as it gets. If you reckon those Shell V-Power Mustangs are dominant, think again.
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