Nissan's bespoke monster

Proudly Japanese, the GT-R disdains the prettiness of Italian supercars for something more masculine and functional.

Those laps were obviously just a taster. Now, despite a one-week loan and hundreds of kilometres over a variety of roads, I still felt like I'd only scratched the surface.

But the car in the driveway was dead, completely unresponsive to the buttons on the key. Through the driver's window I could see the reason: I'd left the lights on. The battery was out cold.

In this car, that presents a problem. There's no traditional key slot; sensors in the doors trigger the locks and they weren't working because there was no power. So there was no chance of gaining entry and releasing the bonnet. In any case, thanks to its location, an ordinary jump-start was out of the question. I called Nissan and waited for the cavalry to arrive with a portable battery. And I abandoned any thoughts of another drive.

No more wheel time, then, but I had learned more about the car. For all its performance credentials, this $156,000 super-coupe can be undone by the lack of a light sensor that's standard on Nissan's $34,000 Maxima sedan.

It's not the only thing missing, either. Those headlamps don't have the ability to swivel and illuminate corners, an increasingly common feature. The boot of the GT-R is tall and limits vision when reversing, but there are no parking sensors. A lane-change blinker function - when a little push on the indicator wand gives three blinks - is absent as well.

And after the GT-R had power-surged back to life, it was clear that despite a plethora of gauges, it misses a dial for battery voltage.

If I were a GT-R owner, the sum of these small irritations would be less like annoyance and more like puzzlement. The car was designed to be a no-expense-spared world beater. Its performance is mind-blowing and, unlike some cars, there's no sense that corners have been cut to shave cents from the price; quite the opposite.

In a proud lineage, this is the first GT-R not based on a volume vehicle but purpose-built from the ground up. Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn charged his engineers with the task of beating the Porsche 911 Turbo and they spent six years solving the problems of how to make a car go extremely quickly.

Virtually everything on the GT-R is bespoke, from its chassis to its twin-turbocharged 3.8-litre V6, from its tyres to its rear-mounted dual-clutch transmission.

There's clever use of lightweight materials such as carbon fibre and a shape honed in a wind tunnel for a coefficient of drag figure of just 0.27, one of the best around.

The result is brutal pace, with an unofficial 0-100km/h time under 4.0 seconds. During testing, the GT-R tore great chunks from the production car record around the Nurburgring circuit in Germany, the unofficial benchmark for supercars.

On any given road, regardless of price, there's virtually nothing that can touch it.

The design is a muscular statement of that ability. Proudly Japanese, it disdains the prettiness of Italian supercars for something more masculine and functional. The result isn't beautiful but has some very successful elements, particularly the wedge-shaped cabin with darkened A-pillars giving a wraparound look to the glass. There are also splendid details, such as the pistol-grip door handles, which are also used by Aston Martin but better executed here.

However, just like the oddly patchy equipment list that omits auto-headlamps, it's an uneven result. Some panels are too slabby and some surfaces too bland, especially the rear, which even the GT-R's signature twin round tail-lights cannot salvage. The saving grace, for an owner, is that on the road it's unmistakeable. Buy a GT-R and you buy into the big reputation, which draws lots of attention.

As with the exterior, the cabin is a roller-coaster ride from surprise-and-delight features to purely serviceable, and back again.

  NEED TO KNOW Nissan GT-R

The front seats are excellent and comfortable, driving position first rate and all the driver contact points - wheel, pedals and switchgear - look and feel special. The dial cluster tilts with the wheel so that the instruments stay unobscured. The materials are well-chosen and a leather-covered dash at this level is a treat.

The downsides include reflections off the dashboard onto the windscreen in strong light and wide C-pillars that block over-the-shoulder vision.

The rear window could do with a wiper, while the rear itself is a no-go zone, with occupants' heads positioned under the glass and no knee or foot room, vents or lights.

All the effort has been lavished on the driver, with a pitch for the computer game generation that is unrivalled by any other car. A large display screen offers 10 views, most with multiple virtual dials and some customisable. Among the options, you can watch a plot of acceleration or deceleration g-forces in real time, alongside gauges showing the percentage of throttle or brake being used. It's in-car telemetry of a high order, although I couldn't help wondering whether it served any useful function - beyond entertainment - away from a racetrack.

On road or track, the GT-R drive experience is unique. The engine sounds like a taxiing jet that is more or less ready for take-off depending on the angle of your foot on the throttle. This is a flexible engine that can hold a high gear to revs only just above idle, then zip through to a thunderous 7000rpm redline. The pace it delivers is ferocious yet drama-free, without the usual lags and surges associated with turbochargers. It just piles on speed.

Dual-clutch transmissions are de rigueur for performance cars and this unit swaps cogs quickly via paddles behind the wheel or can be left in auto mode.

Oddly, it sounds more like a sequential robot-clutch manual than a dual-clutch, with strange mechanical sounds emanating from under the car as though it's swallowing bolts. The transmission can be jerky on small throttle openings, too, especially from cold, when it can be hard to pull away smoothly.

However, both throttle and brake pedals feel millimetre-precise in the Porsche manner. On the racetrack the brakes suffered from fade but in less-demanding road conditions they seem very capable.

They need to be. The GT-R is a weighty 1750kg and although the engine and transmission lie between the axles the car cannot disguise its substantial mass. The suspension set-up has been tuned to keep this weight well under control and the huge wheels, with their wide rubber, transmit every tarmac irregularity into the cabin. Under hard acceleration or braking, the rubber rips into the road.

Even on the comfort setting, the car's adaptive dampers deliver an uncompromising ride and there's a phenomenal amount of road noise.

With everything so tied down, one consequence is a remoteness to the car's steer-

ing and dynamics. The messages they send aresimply overwhelmed and you end up piloting this car with your head rather than your intuition.

There's more than one car in here, too. Thesuspension toggles between three settings and there are similar switches to configure thetransmission response and how the all-wheel drive system works with the electronic stability program.

I had been expecting the GT-R to drive like a very powerful Mitsubishi Evo or Subaru WRX. However, most of the time all the torque is sent to the rear wheels and I was surprised at how much the car felt like a traditional rear-wheel drive performance coupe.

Then I realised that one of the toggles would reprogram the system for greater involvement of the front wheels and suddenly, it seemed as though there was a whole new dynamic dimension to explore.

Even if you don't leave the lights on and drain the battery it would take more than a week to probe all of this.

However, as a performance champion for the internet generation - despite its flaws and omissions - the GT-R hits its target with a resounding thud.