The very best cars don’t come from bean counters, they come from true car people. And Hiroshi Tamura’s car guy credentials are unassailable.
He’s the chief product specialist for the Nissan GT-R and for NISMO, so he’s in charge of planning for the GT-R and making it continually better and faster.
That also means he gets to work on advancing the legend of his own dream car. A longtime hardcore Skyline fan, his personal car is a sleeper-ish R32 Skyline GT-R with a very healthy 600 horsepower.
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Here’s a little background on him from a 2014 interview with PistonHeads:
The love of Skylines started in 1972 watching the first-generation Skyline GT-R racer. That sparked a dream of joining Nissan that achieved in 1984 but he only finally got to working on the GT-R in 1997, when his first job was product planning for the few official R33 cars we got in the UK.
But just two years later the R34 appeared incorporating all the mods from his own personal R32.
And what a car it is. Tamura is an absolute obsessive. He pushed and pushed his own car to get it exactly right, to correct anything he considered a fault and extracted the absolute best.
He calls it a sleeper and apart from wheels you’d be hard pushed to spot this car has 600hp. Which is about what the infamous Group A ‘Godzilla’ Skyline GT-Rs had when they trounced the Aussies at Bathurst in the early 90s. It’s also the same as the latest NISMO car. As Tamura explains it, the four-wheel-drive car has “150hp through each tyre”.
Not bad at all.
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Tamura-san will be around the next half-hour to answer all your questions about the GT-R, Skylines, Nismo, and anything else that might be on your mind. Ask away!
Update: Sadly Tamura-san had to go, but thanks for all your questions.
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