Banzai!

Looks like we've started our own Midnight Club.

Tokyo's infamous nocturnal racers are the Godfathers of 21st century car culture, the most honourable law-breakers you'll ever find. Before YouTube, before Gran Turismo, before the internet, before mobile phone cameras, before mobile phones, we'd all heard about these guys - bankers, lawyers, businessmen, who knows what else - seeking out the double ton on Tokyo's elevated expressways and beyond.

Something to do with the strictures of that over-crowded city and the rigidity of Japanese life led these renegades to decompress in a most spectacular style. The stories - 200mph in an F40 in a tunnel - became legend. Automotive anarchy has never been cooler.

It's also given us cars like the Nissan GT-R. Numerous incarnations later, more than I can remember anyway, the Skyline name has been kicked into touch. It's a shame. You sense that Nissan is slightly ashamed of the fact that all previous Skylines have been steroidal versions of much humbler cars, yet that's one of the things that's always appealed most about them. A pathological obsession with transforming something ordinary into something extraordinary. Very Japanese.

It's a sign of the times, I guess, that Nissan can now go straight to the top table. The obsession is the same; the platform, these days, bespoke. No more tweaked taxi cabs here, guys. We're talking 7min 38sec laps of the Nürburgring now, and hand-built twin-turbo engines with plasma-sprayed 0.15mm cylinder liner bores. Empirical proof of greatness.





Meanwhile, a new generation has grown up for whom the veneration is reserved not for Ferrari or Porsche, but for Nissan. The latest GT-R is the axis around which this cultural shift pivots. With this car, the Playstation generation finally comes of age. It could be rubbish, this thing, and it would still be a car of the year.

All this information is fizzing and popping around my head as we take on Tokyo tonight. We've been tooling about at ground level for ages, letting the neon and the smells and the general 24/7 weirdness soak into the cars' bodywork. But what's weirder? Twilight-zone Tokyo shimmering and winking at me through the jet lag, or the fact that our supercar showdown was between a Nissan and an Audi?

Ah yes, the Audi. Parked up somewhere in Ginza, Tokyo's shiny commercial centre, it suddenly dawns on me that I've now driven the R8 on three separate continents. In Vegas in January, it just shaded its bigger, brasher cousin, the Lamborghini Gallardo. In September, I got into one not long after scaring myself witless in Porsche's new 911 GT2 and drove home round the M25 in torrential rain.

Inching through a 60-mile tailback on London's heinous orbital, the R8 was sublime: easy to drive, smooth, multi-purpose (good wipers too). The ultimate supercar, in fact. Now, on the other side of the world, it faces the GT-R. The year's other ultimate multi-purpose supercar.

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What az amazing test!!
Two of my favorite cars right now!
Thanx so much for posting. Wish there was a video of this.

Just awesome gorgeous machines,i can't even decide which i like more

Both of them are special in their own way...

It's really hard to pick between these 2.

Awesome test. Thanks for posting.

Ι like the GT-R a lot but not in red!