Apr 21stPopular Bosozoku cars: Nissan Skyline C210 Japan

This week we feature one of the most popular bosozoku style cars: the Skyline C210, also known as the Skyline Japan. Only the Skyline C110 and Nissan Laurel are more popular than the Skyline Japan.

This Skyline may be well known amoung the visitors here, our logo is showing one of the headlights of this Skyline:

Bosozoku style Skyline C210
In my opinion the best bosozoku styled Skyline C210 and maybe even the best styled of all bosozoku styled cars I’ve seen! It has got almost everything right: the oil cooler, headlight and grille swap from a Laurel, wide over fenders, wide sideskirts, big grachan styled lip and spoiler. Only thing missing is the sharknose but that would ruin this car I guess.

Speaking of sharknoses:

Sharknosed Skyline C210
A good example of the many sharknosed Skyline C210s I’ve seen. Sharknoses are most probably popular on the Skyline Japan because of its longer bonnet (6 cylinder engines only) and boxy image. It makes the bonnet look even larger, like on the G-nosed Fairlady Z S30, and it just looks right in combination with the trunk sloping downwards.

Also very beautiful and popular on the Skyline Japan is the kyusha look:

Kyusha styled Skyline C210
This example is just about right: a small cooling duct for the turbo in the bonnet, small overfenders, a decent spoiler and a 70s sports lip. The removal of the left headlight in favor of the air intake is also a nice choice, however without it the car would have been perfect.

In august 1977 Nissan launched the C210 as the 5th Skyline: the successor of the Skyline C110 (better known as the Kenmeri Skyline) which featured a coupe, sedan and estate as bodystyles. It got, just like the Kenmeri, its nickname from the Skyline tv advertisements which praised it as the “All new Japan Skyline”

The car was just as popular as the Kenmeri eventhough this Skyline never got a GT-R badge nor raced! Due to the oil crisis Nissan ruled out any performance designation on their cars to prevent a bad image.

Factory stock Nissan Skyline C210
However after a few years the oil crisis was already forgotten and racecars entered the turbo age. Nissan responded in April 1980 with the Skyline GT-EX featuring a 2 liter L20ET turbo engine and this was the first Japanese production vehicle ever to make use of a turbo engine!

Back then this turbo engine was very crude compared to what we are used to nowadays: the L20ET did not feature an intercooler nor a blowoff valve however it did feature an emergency release valve in case the pressure became too high, so imagine how this car must have felt when driving it: big turbo lag and the turbine stalling when you release the throttle while the exhaust gasses have no where to go! Scary!

Talking about engines, the Skyline C210 had only a limited range of engines: the coupe and sedan only featured the Nissan L engine ranging from 1.6 to 2.0 liter and of course the 2.0 liter L20ET turbo. The estate did feature a 2.8 diesel engine and the export models did feature a 2.4 and 2.8 variant of the L engine. This turbo engine delivered an extra 15HP above the normal 2 liter engine and outputted 145hp. It may not sound as much, but remember this was dated only at the beginning of the turbo age!

Factory stock Nissan Skyline C210
The TI models (1.6 and 1.8 4 cylinder cars) got rectangular taillights while the GT models (2.0 and turbo 6 cylinder cars) got the round taillights.

The 4 cylinder cars were 10 cm shorter between the front wheelarch and the front door than the 6 cylinder cars. This was basically the same solution as used with the Celica XX: to fit the 6 cylinder engine the chassis was lenghtend.

Factory stock facelifted Nissan Skyline C210
In august 1979 the C210 gets a facelift: the round headlights are replaced by square headlights.

The facelifted version of the car is very well known from Seibu Keisatsu (????) as the black Skyline GT-EX Turbo Super Machine-X cop car:

It was featuring a lot of nifty 80s cop stuff like an automatic high speed camera, electrically operated patrol light, a gun behind the grille and of course a complete computer!
The exposure of Skyline thanks to the GT-EX turbo Super Machine-X boosted sales of the Skyline C210 so much that Nissan decided to donate brand new models as the new police cars. In this way the 280ZX, Skyline R30 and S110 Gazelle were plugged by Nissan this way.

In august 1981 the life of the Skyline C210 ended and it was replaced by the Skyline R30.

I really understand why this car is one of the most popular styled cars: it has got a turbo (ahum)) and it just looks right with or without a lot of modifications!