Wind that snaps aluminum poles like celery sticks plays happily through the infield of California Speedway. NISMO staff shuts the garage door against gusts that blow laptops off tables and sprays desert grime onto two of the most impressive racecars to ever bless any oval track in the United States.
We are to spend four days perched within shooting and writing distance of NISMO's GT500 JGTC All- Star race effort at California Speedway in Fontana, Calif., part of an orgiastic weekend of automotive delights thrown by GT Live last December. NISMO, short for Nissan Motorsports International, manages Nissan's major overseas efforts in JGTC and Dakar racing, in addition to developing an extensive line of tuner parts.
The plan is to waltz into the garage with a big Texan grin, a firm handshake, and, if necessary, a case of Sapporo beer. Disappointment is the product of expectation, so we anticipate nothing and hope only to ingratiate ourselves with our hosts.
We hover outside the garage for several hours awaiting official permission to set foot on hallowed ground. With consent offered after a flurry of phone calls, we move self-consciously into the garage, saying sumimasen, or "I'm sorry," with every other breath as no matter where we stand, we are in the way.
The Japanese are unique. Watch a reel of social interaction among the Ubangi tribe in central Africa and fear is read as fear, anger as anger, complex emotion as real and immediate. Take a group of Japanese, throw in a dash of hierarchy and the situation is as obvious to an outsider as plate glass is to a sparrow.
Millennia of formality and discipline have produced a communicative dance of such nuance that our translator for the weekend serves less to translate words than make sense of silence, interpret the timing of nods and measure the sweep of bows. Us, well, we just belch and scratch our balls. Better to be a known quantity than attempt to sing in a chorus where we know neither the music nor meter.
JGTC offers some of the most competitive and technologically charged racing on God's paved earth. Both teams and drivers hope the All-Star race, a 200-mile enduro run at night replete with multiple pit stops, will be a chance to give the American public something to cheer, lust and hopefully campaign for. The GT Association, which oversees the JGTC, is attempting to globalize the series. A stagnant Japanese economy and competition from series requiring far less investment, like D1GP, necessitate such a move.
To that end, the GT Association is working with the FIA to change the name of the series to something that doesn't include the word Japan. Last year, a points event was held in Malaysia, with an exhibition round in China and one here. With a little luck and some letter writing, we might just get a points round stateside.
After 35 years, the Z-car still echoes its original formula: rear-wheel drive, six cylinders and styling cues paralleling contemporary European marques. The Z has always been a sales success, backed by one of the most winning legacies in sports car history, dominating both amateur and professional racing and even producing outright wins at Daytona and Sebring.
In its debut at the beginning of the 2004 season, the NISMO Z was instantly quick, winning its first race, and by season's end winning four of seven regular-season races, giving NISMO and drivers Richard Lyons and Satoshi Motoyama the JGTC GT500 championship.
The silver and red Z's before us are monuments to progress, fashioned from carbon cloth that weighs an ounce but can support a ton, alloys that stomach infernal temperatures and synthetic compounds that sacrifice their molecules for the greater good of metal, myth and flesh. One need not be an engineer to grasp the righteousness of these machines-passing children stare with open mouths and grown men respond with no greater sophistication.
The NISMO GT500 350Z is the most potent Z-car ever
But, some protest, there's barely enough Z left for this rolling masterpiece to actually be called a Z. We say if Michael Jackson can still be considered human, then a 350Z with millions in structural surgery can still be considered a Z.
Ultimate, yes, but this speed utensil is finite. The machine that birthed this monster deserves greater praise. The NISMO team's solidarity goes beyond any clichd labels like "good teamwork." Individual investment is total, and the aggregate wins championships.
If Zen Buddhism can be partially understood by watching the interaction between monk, rake and a pebbled yard, so too can the NISMO machine from the relationship between crewmember, a rag and a 10-inch strip of paint. In the middle of the rear bumper lies a recess with five flat surfaces where a license plate would sit on a street.
A crewmember approaches the rear bumper with a rag and a bottle of detailer. The license plate surface is cleaned in a series of horizontal passes, followed by a series of vertical passes, leaving silver paint to glow through thick clear coat. The crew man turns over the rag and cleans the remaining three visible strips of recess. He turns the rag again, and the top of the recess, beheld only by darkness, is wiped once, then twice. Then he contemplates what dirt has transferred to the rag, turns it again, and cleans this 6-inch stretch a third time.
Red and white NISMO short-sleeved button-up shirts, tucked into charcoal NISMO pants that fall over matching black and red New Balance sneakers, adorn all 24 crew men. There are 30 so dressed at domestic events, charged with the two factory cars in Xanavi and Motul livery. These are just the rehearsal clothes. All crew wear matching red and white fire suits on race day, with their names and blood types emblazoned on the waist straps.
Movement in and around the cars happens in waves. The crew moves frenetically under, around and through the cars, followed by stretches of total stillness, save for the clicking of keys by engineers whose jetlagged faces are lit by the pallid glow of laptop screens.
Other teams sharing the large garage hang lit cigarettes from chattering mouths as they work. Wisps of smoke mix with the sharp odor of 100-octane Sunoco race fuel. The NISMO crew moves outside in rotations for their nicotine snacks. We see red duct tape gainfully employed righting a snapped Marlboro.
Even though the habitually clean cars and work surfaces are to us the fruits of textbook OCD, the team views them as disorganized and even embarrassing. Despite being a jewel in the crown of NASCAR, pit crews are unanimous in their contempt for the archaic facilities at the seven-year-old California Speedway. With cramped pits, a lack of compliance with the digital age and an inconvenient layout, it forces the odd tool to be unacceptably out of place.
It took seven 44-foot ocean containers to carry the machine's two factory cars and the digital infrastructure from Japan. And a machine wound this tightly must go home with all its parts.
Perhaps the machine's biggest strength is obsessive development of the cars. Ounces make pounds and tenths make seconds. So the hood hinges are carbon fiber. Fuel-filling hoses are tested to realize the slightest increase in flow. Pit tools are customized and redesigned to increase efficiency. The cars' steering wheels tilt up, rather than coming off, to ease driver egress and ingress, as some portion of a second was so gained.
No manufacturer, including Nissan, will disclose cost, but it's been rumored the NISMO JGTC program costs more than a major WRC effort, which would put the number somewhere north of $60 million annually. Nissan values each car at around $1 million. The rest of the dough goes to the tremendous amount of research, development, transportation, lodging and food for the machine.
The crew stretches TensaBarriers in front of the open garage doors because the team is fed a constant stream of enthusiasts with the rabid zeal of boy-band fans. The murmur of the swirling crowd is independent of the faces. The pan-Asian, pan-Latin and pan-whitey melting pot that is Southern California spews myriad tongues, mouths shaping words in two languages in the same sentence.
Universal, however, is MTV's contribution to the advancement of young minds. The dialect seemingly celebrated by all California youth, regardless of creed or color, is characterized by eloquence like "Yo, check this shit out yo!"
Part and parcel to the JGTC experience are "circuit ladies," or umbrella girls. We meet Takayo Negishi, statuesque and sweet, whose specialties, according to the fact sheet we are handed, are tennis and sewing. Her hobbies are swimming and, of course, shopping.
California Speedway was built primarily to cash in on America's fascination with circulating billboards and features a large, high-banked oval with a flat, featureless infield road course. To the chagrin of teams, the standard 2.8-mile sports car configuration was traded for a shorter, modified 2.3-mile course using less of the oval. With no races on comparable tracks in Japan, tire engineers balked at the risks of placing unknown load and speed demands on their tires with these hugely fast, high-downforce GT cars.