Nissan racing division Nismo opens first Performance Centre outside Japan in Melbourne, more Australian sites to come

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Nissan’s motorsports skunkworks, Nismo, has opened its first workshop outside Japan, in Melbourne’s outer eastern suburbs.

Attached to an existing Nissan dealership in Ferntree Gully, the Nismo Performance Centre Melbourne will handle factory-backed restoration programs and provide genuine Nismo performance and heritage parts, through technicians certified by Nismo’s headquarters in Yokohama. “Customer experiences” are also promised.

Though Nismo offers upgrades to almost every Nissan model in Japan, abroad it’s best known for enhancing Nissan’s sports cars. It’s responsible for the tuned flagship of Nissan’s Z range, and before that track-honed variations of Nissan’s groundbreaking GT-R.

Australia hasn’t been chosen at random. As a fellow right-hand-drive market, Nissan’s bleeding-edge Japanese domestic models of the 1980s and 1990s were easy to offer here. We were one of the few nations to receive official imports of the Skyline GT-R in its glory days.

The Skyline GT-R rose to fame in Australia before anywhere else. Between 1990 and 1992, Nissan dominated the Australian Touring Car Championship, the predecessor of V8 Supercars; the nickname “Godzilla” was the work of the local Wheels magazine.

Initially, the R32, R33 and R34 Skyline GT-Rs (1989-2002) will be the Performance Centre’s initial focus. Such is the variety of spare parts offered that Nismo has all but resumed production of the RB26DETT engine that powered them.

Nissan famously underquoted the RB26’s power. Listed as 206kW to obey a gentlemen’s agreement between Japanese carmakers, the 2.6-litre, twin-turbo straight-six regularly exceeded 240kW when tested. It gained a reputation for extreme durability and tuners have extracted three or four times that amount from RB26es.

Nismo has confirmed the Performance Centre’s scope will shortly widen beyond Skylines. It’s a fair bet the next Australian Nissans to be offered factory-backed Nismo overhauls will be the Z sports car and its predecessors, the R35 GT-R, and the 200SX.

The latter, also called the Silvia, is often considered the drift car, and its SR20DET engine, a turbocharged two-litre straight-four, is also held in high regard by tuners.

Details of additional Nismo Performance Centres and “further elements of the Australian program”, both slated for next year, have yet to be announced by Nissan Australia.