First of all PZR, i don't think anyone here is trying to belittle the Japanese involvement or the performance of the Nismo cars, and it is great that yourself can give us some perspective from the Japanese side.
The fact is the Japanese touring car scene was abit 'low profile' compared to the likes of the ETCC, WTCC, DTM, BTCC and ATCC when it came to Group A racing. There was just not alot heard or spoken about it in this part of the world at the time (or since really, i was amazed to find out last year that there hadn't been a JTCC since 1999!), hence why alot of our quotes and knowledge are from the Australian or European perspective. Our local motor racing magazines and TV telecasts would report on the Euro-goings on (and vice versa, thanks to the deal between Hay-Fisher Productions in Europe and Channel 7 in Australia when it came to swapping footage), but very rarely were there mentions of the Japanese series. There just wasn't enough information coming in about it for enthusiasts to know any different.
Not even when the likes of Allan Grice/Graeme Crosby & Peter Brock/Allan Moffat raced at Fuji in 1986 (after so much was made of their ETCC trips earlier in the year) was much noise made about it locally, let alone when Allan Moffat won the race with Klaus Neidzweidz in 1989.
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Originally Posted by PZR
The NISMO Gr.A R32s totally dominated their national series, and with a really good reliability record too. Maybe we could speculate that their local competition wasn't up to snuff - but that was not NISMO's fault. All this talk about 'faster' seems to ignore the fact that the NISMO cars certainly could have gone a lot faster than they did ( and simply by turning the wick up on some occasions ) but more often than not they simply didn't need to. They were even controlling supply of engines and other race parts to their non-Works GT-R competitors, and could frown threateningly at the likes of HKS should they have the temerity to go a little faster than they ought to - which was probably enough to slow them up a little!
It appears that the Australian series was a little more closely fought, and the Gibson team had to push their development and driving just that bit harder - with the result that they sometimes broke or crashed. I don't think the situations in Japan and Australia are directly comparable, and just as much as the Gibson effort deserves due recognition I believe the Japanese effort should not be dismissed with a pat one-liner. How about some two-way respect here?
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That probably was the case, after-all they were doing enough to win the races, and i'm quite sure they could have developed them alot more to go quicker if they had to, considering the budget they would have had at their disposal.
However just because they could have gone quicker, doesn't make Gibson's statement any less true that at the time his cars had more hp than the Nismo cars, afterall that was what they had to do to win in Australia, the same as Nismo was doing what they had to do in Japan
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Originally Posted by PZR
Sorry, but that's just plain absurd. I won't belittle the Gibson team project, but you must surely understand that the Gr.A R32 GT-Rs ( and indeed the street version sold to the general public on which it was based ) was the child of Nissan and NISMO in Japan, who designed, engineered and homologated it. The Gibson team might well have gone down their own path after they got their first cars ( and - as said so many times - hats off to them for going their own way and doing so well ) but your statement seems to completely discount the origin of the cars and the fact that Japanese Gr.A cars even existed. Surely you must be aware of what was taking place in Japan before Gibson's got their cars?
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I don't think anyone is trying to say that Gibson was #1 in the pecking order at Nissan HQ in Japan. Indeed in 1988 they were #3, behind the Nismo JTCC cars, the ETCC entry, then the Australian cars were next inline, meaning they couldn't debut their HR31's until halfway through the ATCC that year.
And ofcourse HR31's had run in the last round of the 1987 WTCC at Mt Fuji.
Indeed Allan Grice has mentioned in many interviews how he was involved in initial testing of the R32-GTR for Group A competition in late-1988, when he was still a Nissan contracted driver after partnering Win Percy in the ETCC that year in works European-based Skyline HR31.