The Customer Is Always Right: Bob Forbes Racing & the GIO GT-R

All of your customers are partners in your mission. – Shep Hyken

So obviously, with the Nissan Skyline R32 GT-R being the car of the moment, you wanted one, right? Well, there was good news and bad news on that front. The good news was, you could have one! Honestly, they were available for purchase, no reasonable offer refused. The bad news was, whether you planned to take it to Bathurst or just wanted one for the daily commute, you were going to need some very deep pockets...

No Tokyo Thrift: the Australian GT-R
The R32 Skyline had been on sale in Japan since 1989, but thus far it had been a JDM-only prospect. Nissan had only ever intended it for the home islands, with export potential as far from their minds as... well, as east is from west. That it ended up on our shores as a first-hand buy was thanks to Nissan Australia boss Ivan Deveson, who wanted it on local roads as a branding exercise to take advantage of the success of the racing team. Because import fees and taxes would drive the price up, there was no point sending the lesser variants, so for Australian buyers it would be the GT-R or nothing. And because it was imported under the Specialist and Enthusiast Vehicle Scheme, just 100 cars would be available.

We always wanted to connect our mainstream product with motorsport, otherwise why bother? And after we finished building [the R31] Skyline at Clayton – which itself was a bad decision because it was a good money-maker for us, and a good car too – we then had to think of another way of making the motorsport connection work.

We didn't have a local car that would demonstrate that what we raced on Sunday would sell on Monday. So a guy called Ted Arcadipane, who is essential to this story and was in our business planning group, put together a paper with me on importing the R32 GT-R.

Given how hard Fred Gibson and his team struggled with the previous Skylines, by the time we got to the R32, I guess we were pre-empting what ultimately happened – that it was going to be the gun vehicle. We didn't predict that it was going to destroy Group A, but we certainly had a strong feeling that it was going to be the gun car in Australia for motorsport.

That's also why we decided to import 100 production cars. We put a business case together with what I knew at the time were the local changes required to get the car ADR'ed. That went to local management, who approved it, and then we went back to Japan and said, "Please can we do this?" – Paul Beranger, head of Nissan Motorsport Australia, in Motor magazine's Nissan R32 Skyline GT-R: the "Godzilla" Legend

Australia's first batch of twenty-eight GT-Rs were built at Nissan's Murayama plant in May of 1991, with another twenty-two following down the same line in June, and the final fifty in August. Thirty-seven of them were in Jet Silver, with the same number Red Pearl Metallic and the remaining twenty-six in Black Pearl Metallic – to simplify production only three colours were offered, rather than the nine available in Japan. They were lifted off the ships in Melbourne and then allocated a combined $250,000 budget and fifty hours per car for the all-important process of modifying to meet Australian Design Rules, without which they would be illegal to drive on Australian roads.

"That was our biggest challenge" said Paul Beranger. "Japan agreed for us to do it, but they threw it back on us, saying, 'Okay, we will support you, but you do the work' – which was very substantial. The GT-R was only built for Japan's domestic market, so we needed to make all sorts of changes – radios, headlights and taillights, mufflers for drive-by noise, seatbelts..."

He wasn't exaggerating: child seat restraints had to be fitted, a fuel filler restrictor was needed, and they had to add new side intrusion bars to meet Australian legislation. The side indicators and high-mounted rear brake light (both safety non-negotiables) were sourced from the locally-available Nissan 300ZX, with the new headlights and taillights done by Hella Australia. The Japanese-market "S" (for Skyline) bonnet badge made way for a Nissan logo, and the GT-R received a new "bee-sting" antenna mounted at the back of the roof, "because the Japanese car had a glass-mounted antenna, which was rubbish." This also meant local cars got a Blaupunkt sound system to replace the rather lacklustre OEM unit.

The mechanicals mostly remained intact, with one notable exception: "We had to add a transmission cooler, because the Japanese engineers did theoretical projections to show that the transmission would overheat in outback Australia if you drove it at 180km/h for two hours!" At that speed the GT-R would run out of fuel after about one hour, but as Beranger pointed out: "We didn't want any delays to the programme, so when a Japanese engineer tells you it needs a transmission cooler, you just go along with it and install one." Clayton had also wanted it on Yokohama tyres, because Gibson Motorsport team sponsored by Yokohama, but Japan refused, pointing out that the GT-R had been developed around Bridgestone Potenza RE71s. So Bridgestones it had to be, regardless of the local association with Peter Brock! One benefit for the Aussie cars, however, was that the 112km/h speed limiter that was mandatory in Japan could be junked, leaving the local GT-R to roam wild and free.

One GT-R idea that HSV later adopted with a vengeance was providing an owner's compendium. A sort of expanded owner's manual, it came with lists of specialist GT-R dealers, a press kit, the sales brochure, three photographs, a Nissan-branded pen and a booklet by Jim Richards and Mark Skaife explaining how to drive your new sports car. It also had a useful list of service stations that sold the necessary 95 RON fuel, which could be a bit hard to find in an era when unleaded petrol was only five years old. [Anecdote from the Rocking Chair: Just to give you an idea, at my first job the four petrol grades available were normal unleaded (91), premium unleaded (95), the franchise's version of 98, and something called "Lead Replacement Petrol", a fuel designed especially for cars that predated the lead ban. And that was in the early-2000s; 95 only would've been harder to find in 1991. The days of 98 everywhere were a while away yet.]

Given the car's iconic status today you might imagine all one hundred GT-Rs were snapped up before they even left the docks, but you would be wrong. In a story entitled "Farewell to Godzilla", published more than a year after the second batch of GT-Rs had gone on sale, Wheels reported that just sixty-three of them had been sold as brand-new cars – sixty-three! A few probably became dealer demonstrators and some may have gone to New Zealand, but the harsh fact was that the rest languished at the dealerships for several years until sold at steep discounts. The reason came down to the bottom line: when it was new, the price tag for an Australianised GT-R was a staggering $110,000. That works out as nearly $213,000 in 2020 money and, lest we forget, it came in the midst of a major recession.

The Japanese were just as surprised about the $110,000 price tag as many of us in Australia were, but that was just a greedy sales team believing they could make a killing. And they fell over with that one.

The GT-R was so much more expensive than a [$70k] 300ZX that it was very difficult for people to accept that a Nissan, however technically advanced, could cost $110,000 … and that ultimately caused the car to bog down in the dealerships. It really struggled. – Paul Beranger

Remember that according to my back-of-the-envelope calculations last year, the Japanese price for a GT-R was the equivalent of only $41,000, so even when you considered the era's savage tariffs and ADR compliance work, that was some serious price-gouging. The obvious point of comparison was the VN Commodore SS Group A, which competed with it both on the track and in the marketplace, and was also hindered by a bloated price tag. Indeed, Wheels featured a direct comparison in its July 1991 edition, with the cars driven by their ATCC pilots, Jim Richards and Win Percy. Richo gave a rather diplomatic summary of the differences between them.

In its own right, the Holden is terrific as a GT car. The Skyline is, I suppose, a sports car. They're both performance cars, but they do it in two totally different ways. You'd have to say the GT-R is really exciting to drive; the Holden is fun.

The Holden, of course, was not terrific as a GT car, as we've covered before. On paper it did have more power than the GT-R, which might've clinched it had it actually been true, but as we know Nissan had fudged the numbers. So in reality, the GT-R actually made some 260 kW to the Holden's 215, and Wheels' quarter-mile times revealed that reality did not match the marketing blurb: the Holden needed 15.4 seconds to cover the standing 400m, the Nissan just 13.9. But was that second-and-a-half really worth so much more money?

At $218,910, the Ferrari 348 neatly doubled the ask while failing to match the GT-R on acceleration, let alone dynamics or build quality. But how could bragging about one's new Nissan compare with saying you'd just bought a rosso Ferrari? Even the standard Porsche 911 cost 50 per cent more than the Japanese car. – Dr John Wright, Nissan R32 GT-R: Racing First, Road Second, Shannons Club

Had the GT-R been more realistically priced – said Beranger, "I think from memory we were talking $80k-$85k, something like that, and it would've made money, absolutely" – then things might have been different. As it was, the GT-R only appealed to those who valued the driving experience over image, and so attracted only a couple of high-profile owners. It will surprise no-one to learn Mark Skaife had one, in Red Pearl Metallic.

I had one as a company car. Freddie got me a car after I won the [1992] championship and then I ended up buying one. It was just the absolute gun car of the day. They had a really tough road presence about them. I had mine for many years before selling it. Of course, I should have kept it.

The other was, probably not coincidentally, also our wealthiest citizen...

Yes, media mogul Kerry Packer became a GT-R fanboy after another Wheels test (he did own the magazine, after all...), in which race legend Kevin Bartlett evaluated the GT-R against the Honda NSX, Ferrari Mondial and BMW M5 at Eastern Creek. Kev had informed his old mate Kerry of the test, who came down with his son Jamie and spent an hour pounding around Sydney's glittering new autodrome in equally-glittering new performance cars. What happened next was sublimely in character, as detailed by a recent edition of Motor:

After sampling the cars he got ready to depart in his ex-US Army 'Huey' chopper. He pointed to the Nissan.

"Get me one of those cars," he called out.

"Nah, fuck it. Get me two. One for James."

The GIO GT-R
Of course, if you were in the market for a racecar, $110,000 would've been an absolute bargain...

Paul Beranger had already noted that "oil company sponsored teams" had blanched at the cost of a Group A Skyline, but come July, Fred Gibson finally had a taker – Bob Forbes Racing. The former Torana driver had been running a smallish team of Holdens for several years now, turning them out in an attractive cherry-red livery courtesy of the Government Insurance Office, or GIO. The insurance giant was gearing up for a public listing on the ASX (which would happen in August 1992), so they had deep pockets and a pressing need for exposure. Egged on by marketing boss Peter Hilan and deputy MD John Crawford, Bob Forbes bit the bullet and bought himself a GT-R.

We all knew the GT-R was coming out and I was prepared to fund and buy it. GIO agreed to increase the sponsorship over a two-year period to help me amortise the costs.

Ron Missen was doing our cars back then at his place at Ingleburn. I spoke to him about the GT-R and he felt it wasn't something he would like to take on at that time due to the new technology.

So the car was prepared and housed at Gibson Motorsport. I had my guy Paul Taylor working there at Fred's on my behalf assisting Freddie's guys. Paul looked after the preparation of the car and the logistics of transporting it and all the equipment to race meetings. – Bob Forbes, Austalian Muscle Car #96

"That car was as good as our cars," agreed Fred Gibson. "The only differences between them were the drivers and the tyres. Bob had a deal with Dunlop for freebie tyres and we ran on Yokohamas." Indeed, the ongoing tyre war meant there was fierce rivalry between the Japanese tyre giants, and for a while Dunlop refused to supply the Forbes team with their latest compounds, for fear their new relationship with Gibson would give Yokohama a free look at their tech!

The team took delivery of the car on Thursday, 25 July – just in time for the third and final round of that year's AMSCAR series at Amaroo Park. The car got a fifty-lap shakedown ahead of the weekend, with Mark Skaife setting the car up to ensure it would be as good as one of Gibson's own cars (and giving him a taste of Dunlop's rubber into the bargain...). Mark Gibbs said the Nissan people claimed the car had no lag, but that showed how long they'd been lost in the world of 1980s turbos – maybe compared to the old HR31 it had no lag, but coming as he was straight from the Holden V8, Gibbs could definitely feel it.

Not that it slowed them down overmuch. The final AMSCAR round was scheduled for Sunday, 28 July, and was another standalone event consisting of a pair of 10-lap heats. Tony Longhurst grabbed pole, of course, with Gibbs ending up behind him in 3rd spot, still coming to grips with his new car... but that didn't prove to be a disadvantage when the lights went green. 

"I could not believe it," said Gibbs. "It just shot off the line. I was past Tony before he had even moved." Skaife had instructed him to stand on the throttle for maximum revs and then just dump the clutch, and holy cow, it had worked. "I don't like working the engine like that, but that's what they told me, and that's what I did."

By the first corner Gibbs was a second clear of Longhurst, and managed to hold the lead throughout the first lap. Tony took it back in a superb out-braking manoeuvre on lap 2, only to lose it under acceleration a moment later. Over the next eight laps the pair fought door-to-door, swapping the lead three more times before Tony finally took the chequered flag by just 0.2 seconds from Gibbs.

Heat 2 was a similar story, with another launch from the second row that put Gibbs into the lead by the first corner. This time he managed to hold the lead until lap 3, when Longhurst put the position in dispute with more side-by-side racing. The B&H BMW wasn't able to seize the lead permanently until lap 7, but he held it to the flag and won by 0.36 seconds from Gibbs.

This clean sweep of the weekend secured Tony Longhurst's fifth AMSCAR title in six years, and made him for all time the most successful driver in the series, but there was no disputing that the GIO car had made him work for it. It was a very auspicious debut for a brand-new car, and what Gibbs might be able to do once he got used to his new steed would be a matter of speculation only briefly...