HS30-H

So, what are those "Belgians" doing in Norway?

'Peeve', shirley? Give the guy a brake.

LOL One of the dubious 'blessings' of the internet is that images and data soon end up getting moved around, and often end up far away from their original context. Cue pics of the black car in the this thread, which seems to have prompted an amazing amount of questions ( "what is that kit"? "where can I get it?" etc ) which could probably have been answered had it stayed in context...... I just want my photos to stay attached to their original stories, wherever possible. That way at least people have the opportunity to find out anything they might want to know. In the case of the Spirit Garage car, I was just visiting Spirit Garage to buy some parts and Mr Itagaki insisted on taking me out to his home garage to show me the car - so it was an unexpected pleasure. All I did was point the camera at it in between looking very closely at the car and asking Mr Itagaki some questions about it. The car is very interesting, and I even got to sit in it. I admired its high-and-hard unboosted brake pedal, and Itagaki san laughed and said "good feel, eh?". But its arches / overfenders are custom made, and are not any kind of 'kit'. Nor are they directly related to the overfender kits like the one seen on the black car, which can trace their DNA and inspiration back to Nissan's own 'works' circuit race cars and the parts that were homologated for them to use back in 1971, 72 & 73. Here are some pics of similar parts, in component form:

With just the 'right' amount of anniversary, and not even a sniff of irony.

So, what was this thread about again?

Good intentions, but I fear we might be too late. Photos of that black car are all over the internet, and 99.99% of people who post photos of it seem to have no idea of where and what that 'look' originated from. People seem to be able to right-click-and-save photos to their hard drives, but don't read and remember the stories behind them. It's the modern malaise. Speaking of which: The overfenders on the Spirit Garage car are 100% custom made, and are completely different in shape and style to any Nissan 'works' race car parts or Nissan 'Sports Option' parts, which are what the overfenders ( and the G-Nose / works Type B front spoiler ) on the black car originated from - even if they are several generations down the line. By the way, do you recognise the name on those photos? Alan T.

The zccjdm.com site is incorrect. Shirley anybody can see that front and rear are not the same, and that the overfenders on the 240SX and the Z pictured are not the same either. Common sense has to be called into play at some point.......

Those "universal" overfenders have absolutely nothing to do with the overfenders fitted to the black car in your picture. The overfenders on the black car are derived from original Nissan 'Sports Option' parts ( similar to those used on the works Group 4 & Group 5 '240ZR' circuit race cars in Japan during the 1972~3 seasons ) and were designed and made specifically for the S30-series Z body. Two completely different things.

The North American market got a softened up and somewhat dumbed down version of the S30-series Z. All other markets had front and rear ARBs, higher spring and damper rates, faster steering rack ratios and an arguably more 'sporty' 5-speed transmission with matching diff ratio, right from the beginning of production. The rear ARB was part of the original design and engineering ( take a look at the end link holes in your rear 'wishbones' ) but North America was deemed - probably wrongly - to only need a plain vanilla Z with no chocolate sauce. Say thanks to Mr K.

I'm interested in discussing what you wrote. To me ( and Englishman who has spent a fair bit of time in Japan ) it came across as a bit of fairly banal generalisation with a whiff of xenophobia about it. Certainly worth trying to pick a few holes in. Rude not to! This is a forum, after all. Well, you brought up LCD televisions, presumably as some kind of proof of your point (?!)...... Yes, quite so ( and don't forget licensing, out of which many companies have done very well, thank you ). But such influence / mimicry / plagiarism has been going on since mankind first starting travelling. We all do it. To isolate "Asiatic countries" from the "American Continent" and the "European Continent" in this context - with the implication that this is some kind of DNA-governed trait - is to play with fire. Your post was certainly starting to play with matches, to my eyes at least. Perhaps I have a radically different viewpoint and perspective to you? As I've said, your post came across to me ( remember, I'm not American ) as though you were drawing lines in the sand. Hence my "them and us" comments. If you were me ( just pretend - it won't hurt ) what do you think you might think in reading your comments? Ouch! LOL. Your three chosen 'European" manufacturers are all German. I think a few other countries and manufacturers ( holding some pretty heavyweight patents and innovations as their back-hands ) might have something to say about that! Hey, my house has a front door, a back door, some windows and a roof. How about yours? Come on, this whole thing about the E-type and the S30-series Z is just rooted in people trying hard to make connections. Historically - and this is the elephant in the room in this kind of discussion - people have wanted to make these connections because there is a subtext of xenophobia, where people seemed to be unable to accept that Japanese designers and engineers might be 'allowed' the same kind of authorship as any other industrialised nation. At least some of this is rooted in ancient prejudices, but in the mid Twentieth Century there was a little bit of propaganda ( on both sides, granted ) that is still informing the way that some of us think. In reality, the Japanese engineers and stylists who came up with the S30-series Z were just as influenced by the zeitgeist of styling and design in 1966~69 as anyone else was. They were not trying to imitate the E-type ( why would they even want to? ) but were coming up with their own take on what a Sporty GT / 2-seater sports car in a certain ( low! ) price range could be, and that was governed by all sorts of influences and constraints. So too were the team over at the ex-Prince factory, who had come up with the C10-series Skyline range, and who had been given the task to design, style and engineer a successor to the previous generation of Skyline. Naturally, it reflected the zeitgeist of automotive design of the time, and if you half squint you might be able to see a few other design influences in it from rival manufacturers and other countries. It was a typical 'three box' design. Nothing really new, but a good package for the price. Job done, then. Not fair for somebody to call it a 'copy' of anything, I think. See where I'm coming from? I hate seeing this 'copy' word when people start talking about the styling and design of these cars. I think it's lazy, and the people who engineered, styled and designed these cars never get a fair crack of the whip. For most of the time since the S30-series Z debuted we've been told that a German-born American was responsible for it, too. The whole situation is a real mess. There's another pet hate of mine, whilst we are on the subject. Yutaka Katayama may well have "wanted a car for the USA market", but as far as the guys back at Nissan were concerned they were designing cars for the World market as well as their own home market. Their biggest single market was still Japan, and they were certainly not designing and manufacturing any particular series of cars exclusively for the USA market. The stories about the Z being "for the USA" are based on NMC USA's advertising, and Japan was going to have a new Nissan sports / GT car to supersede the Fairlady Roadsters no matter what Katayama is reported to have said he wanted. In the meantime, he was doing pretty damned well selling compact sedans and little pick up trucks like hot cakes, wasn't he? This talk of "Euro/US" designs being "borrowed" ( as though the designs had passports or something ) is faintly ridiculous. At the time we are talking about, everybody was being influenced by everybody else and nobody had any intellectual rights over anything so nebulous as styling anyway. It's hard enough trying to understand what came from where even when looking just at USA-based car styling ( which appears to have been influenced by Italian design in particular, whilst Italian design was being influenced by what it saw in American design, and so on ad infinitum.... ) without bringing some kind of implied xenophobia into it, as though Japanese stylists, engineers and designers were somehow not allowed to play on the same pitch as everybody else. Whilst I'm in full flow ( OK - I'll shut up in a line or two ) shouldn't we be defining the subject of the thread a little more precisely. The '240K' Skyline was an export model in the C110 Skyline range, and it hardly seems fair to compare it with the "240Z" - which first of all was not a fixed-spec model ( Domestic, European, Australian and north American models were all quite different ) and the two were not contemporary anyway. A comparison with the C10-series Skyline might be more pertinent and certainly a lot fairer, but even then we'd be comparing apples with oranges........ And Frank, those 'Brits' who think the Land Rover was the first 4x4 are obviously mad. Are you hanging around with some of the wrong people? Tony, I'm sure you could have a girl in every port if you wanted one. A 'Research Assistant' for every language, and every occasion. Needham would give you a Cambridge University research grant to pay for it! OK, I'll shut up for a little bit now. Peace! Alan T.

Ouch. That's a bit too much of a sweeping generalisation there. What is "American and European" design? Are you lumping those two pretty nebulous concepts together and saying that they are the same thing ( versus "Asian" )? Who believes it? You? What does 'copy' mean in this context, and how on earth can you honestly believe that the S30-series Z design is anything like a 'copy' of a Jaguar ( I presume you mean the E-Type? )? Being influenced by something - even subliminally - is what design is all about. Anything 'new' you create will implicitly be influenced by what came before it, even if it was bad..... The designers / stylists who worked on the S30-series Z had admired some elements of the E-Type, but they admired a lot of other things too. More importantly, they wanted to make their own Sports / GT car rather than just a "copy" of something that was already several years old. "Asian markets"? That's a pretty broad sweep across the map there. China, for one country, might not agree with you. Got any porcelain in your house ( I'm betting you do )? Ever use a compass? Read a book? Have cause to use explosives? China could lay claim to all those and many more. Maybe take a look at Joseph Needham's re-discoveries if you want to know more. The whole topic is very interesting. Television I think is widely accepted to have been 'invented' by a Scot living in London. Not too much to do with the U.S. - so did the U.S. "copy".....? I really don't get all this 'them and us' kind of viewpoint when the topic is - broadly - about 'design' and innovation. Does the world consist of 'them' and 'us'? I'm English. Does that make me a 'them' or an 'us'? And what are "Asian markets"? Is 1776 some kind of Year Zero?

"G8"? I think you might mean 'GR8'........ The Nissan S20 is Prince-derived ( from the GR8, no less ) but it is 100% Nissan. I have two of them ( and a half..... ).

No offence, but I think you need to re-check your data sources. Either you have been fed some complete nonsense, and/or you are completely misunderstanding the normal BS and nonsense that people write about Prince & Nissan engines...... For the record, Prince never designed anything 'for' Mercedes Benz. PMC used some MB-patented valvetrain design details for its G7 engines in the early Sixties, but they were minor details on a majorly Prince in-house design. The design of Nissan's L-series engines can be traced back to the original L20 six of the H130-series 'Cedric Special Six' model which debuted in July 1965 ( chief design engineer on this engine was Mr Hiroshi Iida ) and it was aimed at answering Toyota's new 6-cyl engine in the Crown model. Iida and his team have acknowledged that they looked at Mercedes Benz engines as reference ( amongst others ) but they didn't 'copy'. If they had, you could be that MB would have sued. The often-quoted story is that Nissan acquired the design of the 'L-gata' sixes and fours from Prince when Prince was absorbed into Nissan in 1966 ( the almost bankrupt PMC was forced into a 'Kyu Shu Gappei' with NMC by the Japanese trade ministry ), but the truth is that Nissan's 'L-gata' engine was designed, engineered and produced long before the merger. There's a lot of English language 'schmistory' ( much of it originated from Nissan USA's advertising ) that wants to tell us that the L24 of the Datsun 240Z was a development of the 510-series Bluebird's L-series fours, but this totally ignores the real story for the sake of convenience. They must have figured that the USA market didn't need to know about something that they never had offered to them. Whilst you might find engines that have similar ( if not identical ) bore spacing and head bolt layouts, you won't find any MB heads that are a straight 'bolt-on conversion' for Nissan or Prince engines, or vice-versa. Hope that helps...... Alan T.

All of the overfenders pictured ( including the Arita Speed 'Akira Z' car ) are replicas of original Nissan factory 'Works' overfenders, as used on Nissan's own Group 4 circuit race cars in Japan from 1971 onwards. They were homologated for race use by being sold in Nissan's 'Sports Option' lists, so that private race teams and individuals could buy them for their own cars. They were designed to be matched with Nissan's own Group 4 'Grand Nose', which was homologated with the sale of the HS30-H 'Fairlady 240ZG' model. The deep, ducted front spoiler overlapped the lower part of the front overfenders and the whole kit became known colloquially as the 'Type B' kit ( as distinct from the slightly smaller 'Type A' kit which preceded it ). Many replicas and lookalikes have been produced since the early 1970s, some of them good, some of them not so good. A couple of companies in Japan still make their own versions, and Arita Speed are one of them.

You're going to have to compromise on aspect ratio I think. Michelin TB15 & TB5 F&R: http://www.longstonetyres.co.uk/michelin-tb.php Or Avon CR6ZZ: http://www.longstonetyres.co.uk/Avon-CR6ZZ-Radials.php Both fantastic street tyres.

So Dr.H, what did you eat ( and drink! ) when you were in London? Something a tad less life-threatening than this little escapade, I hope?

Ha! He's got a sneaky eye on that hat-full-o'-cash on the table, and possibly planning to use the wheelchair as a getaway veehickle..... But at least he's blocking the view to that silver, er - thing - behind him. What is that?

No, you edited to delete your original post and to write something completely different instead. LOL

So what do you take this to mean?: I put it in BOLD just in case you missed it......

Yutaka Katayama did not "create" the S30-series Z, or any other series of Z. He's a great man, but miscrediting him with the work of teams - and other individuals - only serves to obscure the facts surrounding his real achievements.

I'm talking about the strut brace ( Cusco, I think? ), the exhaust system, the wheels & tyres, the front spoiler, the Jubilee-clipped meshes on the carb trumpets. Stuff like that. I can't imagine that they are "racing" parts from 1972. What other "racing" modifications has the car got? I see very little that could be described as "racing" specific, rather than mild 'street modified' specific. Nice car. I'm not knocking it. Just this description of a "racing" car doesn't marry up with what I see in the pics.

It's a very nice car, but I see almost nothing that would qualify the term "racing build". It just looks like a few 'street tuning' goodies were added a long time ago, and some more ( modern era ) stuff when it was refurbished. I think it should be insured for what it is now, rather than what somebody might have described it as when it was being sold.

This was a pub in Mildenhall, Suffolk - right? Not a restaurant or eaterie in London? If you weren't happy with it, I hope that you sent it back to the kitchen? "The customer is always right...".

Dr Hunt, If you need any advice / information on my home town, let me know. You've been here before though, so probably don't need it. I dont understand all these comments about poor food. That's a reputation earned thirty years or more ago, and is way out of date now ( we have much more important things to complain about ). London has a mind-boggling number of good restaurants / cafes / bistros / takeaways, with a huge range of ethnic styles. This city is a huge melting pot of nationalities and cultures, and everybody needs to eat. There's more choice here than in just about any other capital city in the world. I think you just need a good guide..... Unfortunately 'The Seashell' in Lisson Grove, Marylebone burned down last week....!

These anecdotes about diff ratios are relatively meaningless without the inclusion of the tyre ( tire ) diameters used.