UR DOORS, two driven wheels and a total of zero
rbochargers. None of this is what we think of when someone
ys GT-R, but this is where it all started. The twin-turbo
l-wheel drive beast we know today owes its existence to
mething very different.
Meet the "Hakosuka" (pronounced hako-ska) GT-R. That’s
ot what Nissan’s paperwork calls the first Skyline GT-R –
GC10 and KPGC10 were the model codes – but it’s become
e official unofficial name of the ‘Box Skyline’. In Japanese,
ako’ means box and ‘suka’ is short for Sukairain, the types
f mountain roads from which the car takes its name: Skyline.
The GT-R story begins in the late 1960s, at a time when
issan had just absorbed Prince Motor Company, and when
e merged engineering knowledge of the two groups was
arting to pay dividends on the track. With the engineers
om Prince having proven their worth by developing the R380
cecar and the previous Prince Skylines, Nissan decided that
e C10 Skyline would be its next performance car project. The
ngine from the R380 and the body of the Skyline road car were
to be the basis for a new motorsport champion.
The man credited as the driving force behind the subsequent
development was Shinichiro Sakurai, an engineer with a tough
work ethic. Sakurai was the type of man who would say
things like “the Skyline is my alter-ego”, according to former
apprentice Naganori Itou. There’s a reason many at Nissan
called him ‘Mr Skyline’. Starting out as an engineer on the
first Prince Skyline in the 1950s, he quickly worked his way
up to become leader of the development team for the third
generation, the Hakosuka. Sakurai then remained in charge of
the Skyline until the R31 generation, before handing the reins
over to his protege Itou.
Under Sakurai’s watch, a re-engineered version of the Prince
GR8 engine, called the Nissan S20, was fitted to the four-
door sedan to create the first Nissan Skyline GT-R, which
was officially called 2000GT-R. The 2.0-litre, 24-valve, dual
overheadcamshaft,six-cylindermotorwastunedtoproduce
118kWand177Nm.ThePGC10bodystylewassoonjoinedby
a slightlylightertwo-doorversioncalledtheKPGC10in1970,
beginningthecoupetraditionofSkylineGT-Rs.
TheHakosukaalsobegananotherSkylineGT-Rtradition–
winning.InthethreeyearsbetweenMay 1969 andMarch1972,
beforetheNissanworksteamsteppedawayfromthesport,
thePGC10andKPGC10SkylineGT-Rshadsecuredsome 50
racevictories.Soundfamiliar?Inthelate'80sandearly'90s,MAIN It mightbe
hard to see aclearlink
between the Hakosuka
and the currentR35,
but the generationsin
between fillthegaps
➜
d motorofficial f motor_mag^81