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No machine has ever done it to me. Not even a Ferrari or one in a state of hyper-tune. But this one did. It wasn’t supposed to... or at least I didn’t expect it to. Blood gushed from the rear of my head to the front. My cheeks and forehead swelled and what I experienced was what fighter pilots would call negative-G. It only lasted a fraction of a second, but was enough to imprint the moment somewhere in my cerebral cortex for life. Just moments ago, I had aggressively attacked a tight left hander in Nissan’s new 370Z at some pretty high speeds, before I went through the dip with wheels in the air followed by a sharp climb that forced my body to go through that whole experience. I was new to the hills of Odawara, about 100 kilometres outside Tokyo – the perfect testing ground for what Nissan call their sixth generation Z.
It’s a car Mr K would probably be proud of. The man who conceived the Z more than 50 years ago, Yutaka Katayama, must be aware of the fact that the Z is in the safe hands of men like Shinjiro Yukawa – though I don’t know whether the legendary Mr K is still around or driving the wheels off a 2017 Z prototype in paradise. The soft-spoken Japanese who currently heads Z product development is humble when he talks about how the new Z was conceived and what they did to bring their new Fairlady up to steam. Then as the product presentation slide moves on to the one that talks about benchmarks, his face lightens up. The words Porsche and Cayman work like triggers for the nattily dressed Yukawa, who thinks Nissan have finally cracked the deep mystery that surrounds the best handling car in the world.It’s designed to be what the 350Z wasn’t exactly – a hardcore driver’s car. Past the blood gushing experience, the eyes took a while to set themselves back in place before the rev-counter and speedo needles started to rise in unison. Everything that Yukawa so painstakingly explained the previous night at the presentation table started to make sense. It was, as if my brain started to tick all the boxes of an imaginary 120-point chart. This Z was starting to make all the right noises.
But it wasn’t always like that. The first pictures of the new Z seemed to suggest it was nothing more than a 350Z reskin exercise. As easy as it was to dismiss the 280Z and 260Z as mere change of attire (if you ignore the 5 mph bumpers and detuned engines that is) over the 240Z, the 370Z felt exactly in the same vein. But it isn’t. How does making the new Z lighter by over 110 kilos compared to its predecessor sound? The 370Z has been designed specifically to deliver a sporty driving experience and that had to be done by attacking the chassis itself. The wheelbase has been shortened by 100 mm over the 350 to make it more chuckable. The front overhang is now longer by 30 mm, but that is to allow the car a more slippery shape. The overall length is down from the 350Z by about 75 mm to make the car more intimate with the driver. Though Nissan never stopped their raft of changes at this point.
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