One of the most influential figures in the Japanese automotive world is the great Dr. Shinichiro Sakurai. Sakurai spent over thirty years on the front line as an automotive engineer, and his greatest claim to fame is as “The Father of the Nissan Skyline.” His work with the Skyline began with the first-generation model, back when he was a young, self-taught engineer for the Prince Motor Company. He was named project leader in the middle of the second-generation Prince Skyline’s development, just before Prince were acquired by Nissan in a landmark, government-steered merger.
Sakurai would continue his work with the new Nissan, leading the development of the re-badged Nissan Skyline. The third-generation Skyline, nicknamed the “Hakosuka” (Box Skyline), is widely considered to be the most important of Sakurai’s works – as it spawned the first Skyline 2000GT-R, the first in a legendary line of Japanese sports cars to carry the famous red and white GT-R emblem.
Sakurai firmly believed that “the technology of racing cars should be used in production cars.” The legendary Skyline GT-R would not have existed were it not for the Prince Skyline 2000GT-B, a homologation special developed by Sakurai for the 1964 Japan Grand Prix GT-II class. With a longer wheelbase built to house a more powerful inline-six engine, one of these Skylines, piloted by a young Prince sports car club driver named Tetsu Ikuzawa, briefly snatched the lead of the race ahead of Sokichi Shikiba’s infamous Porsche Carrera 904 GTS before the silver Porsche ultimately won the race. It was this event that gave birth to the Skyline’s racing legend that has endured for generations.
It was also the catalyst for the development of the Prince R380, the first mid-engine sports prototype to be constructed by a Japanese manufacturer. In the 1966 Japan Grand Prix at Fuji Speedway, the crimson red R380 of Yoshikazu Sunako made history by winning the 360km feature race. Prince avenged their 1964 defeat at the hands of Porsche, defeating privateer Shintaro Taki’s new Carrera 6, and easily thwarted the challenge of Toyota and Yamaha’s joint-developed supercar, the 2000GT.
The R380 project would press forward after the Nissan-Prince merger well into 1967, with the vintage Prince emblem still adorning the front of the car, and each of its successors. The Japan Automobile Federation (JAF) introduced FIA Group 7 regulations for the following year’s Japan Grand Prix, the same rule set used in the popular Canadian-American Challenge Cup (Can-Am) out west. By then, the R380’s successor was already a long way into development. The open-top Nissan R381 was built for Group 7 competition in 1968. Its most striking feature was the dual-element “Aero Stabilizer,” the first successful implementation of a movable aerodynamic device on a Japanese racing car. Two R381s combined to lead all 80 laps of the 480km main event, but it was the R381 with the yellow wing, driven by Moto Kitano, that won in dominant fashion.
Moving the 1969 Japan Grand Prix to the autumn gave Sakurai and his team to develop the R381’s successor, the Nissan R382. The V12-powered R382s finished first and second, with the yellow R382 driven by Motoharu Kurosawa taking the chequered flag for Nissan – ahead of Toyota’s own Group 7 roadster, appropriately named the Toyota 7, and the all-new Porsche 917. This win gave Sakurai’s “R-San” prototypes three wins in the biggest race in the country over a four-year span. Between these Japan Grand Prix victories, and the on-and-off-track success of the Skyline 2000GT-R, Nissan were cementing their reputation as Japan’s foremost name in performance motoring.
So, understandably, whatever car was to come next in the “R-San” series had a noble and daunting legacy to maintain. Shinichiro Sakurai was many things as an automotive engineer: Intelligent, passionate, confident, and never satisfied with complacency, always looking forward. He expressed these values through the cars he built for the public, and certainly, he did the same when it came to his latest racer: The Nissan R383.
Development on the Nissan R383 began in January 1970. It didn’t take long for Sakurai and his team to finalize the plans for the R383, which was completed in February – while the R382 was still testing as an R&D vehicle. With five months remaining until the 1970 Japan Grand Prix at Fuji, in May 1970, the first drawings for the new R383 were complete.
At the heart of the Nissan R383 is the engine, the six-litre, twin-cam V12 GRX-3 motor. It’s an engine whose history requires a quick exposition of its own: The GRX-3 was the successor to the five-litre GRX-1, Nissan’s first V12 racing engine. The GRX-1 was meant to power the R381 at the Japan Grand Prix, but with development starting so late. Sakurai brokered a deal with American tuner Dean Moon to supply a batch of Chevrolet small block V8s for the R381 until the GRX-1 was ready to fire up.
The GRX-1 made its debut in the revised, closed-top “R381-II” in May 1969, making ~520 horsepower. Sufficient, but ultimately less powerful than Toyota and Yamaha’s new five-litre V8, and Porsche’s 4.5 litre flat-12 in the new 917. Under the veil of secrecy, Sakurai and his team redeveloped the GRX-1 into the newer, more powerful GRX-3. The new engine never broke cover until the week of the Grand Prix, much to the ire of Nissan’s closest rivals.
So for the R383, it was decided early on to stay with the GRX-3 engine and continue to develop and refine the motor to reach its outermost limits. As it ran aboard the R382 in the ’69 Grand Prix, the GRX-3 engine made anywhere between 580-600 horsepower at 7200 RPM. For the R383, the naturally-aspirated V12 made another leap forward in horsepower – how far the leap, depends on the source: Racing On magazine rated it at ~630 horsepower at, but Nissan will claim a staggering total of ~700 horsepower, and over 647Nm of torque. The latter figure inspired more headlines, but either figure is still positively remarkable.
Power was fed with ease into a five-speed Hewland LG600 transmission, and cooling was provided through an offset air box placed to the left of the driver, and two large, swooping air inlets along the sidepods, behind the passenger door.
The R383’s carbon-reinforced body aimed for lighter weight and better aerodynamic efficiency. Thanks to the FIA’s ban on high-rise wings in May 1969, the aircraft-inspired Aero Stabilizer could no longer be run at the Japan Grand Prix, and the R382 had to be re-sculpted to fit the new regulations. The new design of the R383 was done to maximize what the regulations in place would allow: The car had a lower drag coefficient thanks to a lower rear duckbill spoiler, a fully-enclosed engine bay, and a lower nose with a NACA duct replacing the R382’s rectangular air intake. The air intake was there to cool the radiator that once sat in the front of the car. By splitting the radiator into two side-mounted radiators, it made the lower nose possible, and the side air intakes helped cool the car more efficiently.
The R383’s chassis was made of the same aluminium-pipe space frame construction from the R382 – which was an improvement on the heavier steel-pipe construction of the R381. But the R383 was 50 kilogrammes lighter than the R382, tipping the scales at 740kg. The car had a wider tread and wider body, with wider front and rear Firestone tyres fitted to 15-inch wheels – 200mm wider in all. And the roll bar was a bit taller, to better protect the driver in the event of an accident. Perhaps one of the few safety considerations made for a car whose combustible fuel tank wrapped around the cockpit.
The R383 represented more of an evolution than a revolution of the Nissan racing concept – but what an evolution it was shaping up to be. In the hands of Nissan’s best drivers – a works squad which, by 1970, featured the likes of Kurosawa, Kitano, Sunako, Kunimitsu Takahashi, Kenji Tohira, Masahiro Hasemi, and young newcomer Kazuyoshi Hoshino – the R383 could have been the first car to break the 1 minute 40 second barrier around the six-kilometre Fuji Speedway, and it certainly was poised to compete for a historic hat trick of Japan Grand Prix victories.
In retrospect, the next turn this story takes maybe shouldn’t have been a great surprise. In the moment, it blindsided the Japanese racing community. With the first R383 chassis not even finished, and just 24 hours after Kitano won the Fuji 300 Mile Race in his R382, Nissan announced on Monday, 8 June, 1970, that they would be withdrawing from the Japan Grand Prix.
Nissan stated that they were changing focus to “solving pollution and safety issues,” an expected response to the Air Pollution Control Act passed by the Japanese government in 1968. No matter how much of a contemporary model of motorsport engineering it was, a car such as the R383 was now the antithesis of every goal that now lay ahead of every Japanese automaker in response to the nation’s first smog act that set to curb vehicle emissions – as were all of the other “big machines” of the Japan Grand Prix.
Four days after Nissan’s withdrawal, the JAF announced on Friday, 12 June 1970, that the Japan Grand Prix would be cancelled. The R383 was still clinging to life, however, thanks to the promise of a new challenge in America.
In July, Nissan tested the R382 with the prospect of running the car in that year’s Can-Am series, beginning in October at Laguna Seca Raceway. If their American venture was successful, the R383 would race in America beginning in 1971 – where there was still one last outer limit to explore. You may remember the prefix “naturally aspirated” was attached to some mentions of the R383 concept.
As early as December 1969, Sakurai and his team thought about a turbocharged GRX-3. In 1970, the GRX-3 engine was tested with a twin turbocharger setup, which according to Nissan, would be used in the Can-Am configuration. With the twin turbo, Nissan claims that the GRX-3 was capable of producing in excess of 900 horsepower, more than the 740 hp that McLaren claims as the maximum output of the eight-litre Chevy V8 from their 1971 championship-winning M8F.
But as Nissan were preparing to aim for new horizons, a tragedy had taken place at rival manufacturer Toyota, who were also aiming for America with a turbocharged Can-Am car. The second testing fatality attached to the Toyota 7 project in eighteen months likely had a profound effect on Nissan.
On Monday, 21 September 1970, Nissan announced that it had ceased development of the R383, ending their prototype racing programme with immediate effect. Preliminary plans for an R384 powered by a new eight-litre V12 engine were abandoned. The only Nissan R383 ever built was quietly tucked away into storage, never to be raced in Japan, or America, or anywhere else in the world.
Since the car never appeared in public, it would have been completely understandable for the Japanese racing fans to think that the R383 was nothing more than a piece of automotive vapourware that never got past the concept stage.
That was, until July 1976, when the press was invited to get an in-depth look at the Nissan R383 for the first time. Photos and diagrams of this mythical machine soon found their way into the pages of Auto Sport magazine, including the cover of the 200th issue on 1 September, 1976. The public would be able to get an even closer look at the R383 when it was exhibited by Nissan at the 1977 Tokyo Motor Show.
The car made its next appearance for the media at Fuji Speedway in May 1984. It was now adorned in a beautiful silver and navy blue livery, which contrasted with the new Skyline C Turbo prototype and Super Silhouette touring car with which it was exhibited. As a show car, the Nissan R383 was fascinating, and sparked the imagination of fans who were already nostalgic for that intrepid era of the Golden Sixties that had since passed. But over this whole span of time, the R383’s engine was never fired up, the car never ran on track as it was intended.
Fast forward two decades, to the year 2006. Nissan and their motorsports subsidiary NISMO had restored the Grand Prix-winning R380, R381, and R382 over the past two years, all of them to running condition. It was only appropriate that the final part of this project would be to restore the R383 to running condition, for the first time ever.
After months of labour, the Nissan R383 took to the track for the first time. First, at a private shakedown at Tsukuba Circuit, on 16 November 2006. It had been over 36 years between the completion of the one and only R383 chassis, and the first time that it was ever driven. After a successful shakedown, the R383 was bound for Fuji Speedway for the annual NISMO Festival, where 28,000 loyal Nissan enthusiasts gathered to watch a precious moment in history: The first public demonstration laps of the phantom racer, the Nissan R383.
With the great Hasemi at the wheel for the demonstration, with its three legendary predecessors running alongside, the roar of the R383’s V12 engine was finally heard. Even when driven slowly and carefully – as is typically seen for historic vehicles such as this – seeing the R383 running on track after 36 years was a special moment for everyone involved. Especially for the R383’s legendary creator, Shinichiro Sakurai, who was involved with the restoration and running of all of the Nissan R38x prototypes between 2004 and 2006, including his final masterpiece.
The R383 has not appeared for subsequent on-track demonstrations in the public since 2006, but it is still kept in running condition, and is proudly exhibited at the Nissan Heritage Car Museum in Zama, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan.
After retiring from his front-line engineering work and passing down the development of the Nissan Skyline to his protegé Naganori Ito, Sakurai went on to become president of Nissan subsidiary Autech from 1986. His life’s work was honoured in 2005, when Sakurai was inducted into the Japan Automotive Hall of Fame. “The Father of the Skyline” passed away on 17 January 2011, at the age of 81. The cars he built are a living monument to the passion that he put into his craft, and race cars like the R383 were the ultimate expression of what he and his team were capable of.
Information Sources: Racing On Magazine Vol. 464, 15 May 2013 and Vol. 470, 17 May 2014
Images courtesy of Nissan
