► CAR drives the Nissan Z in California
► Two-door sports cars aren’t dead yet
► We road trip from Monterey to LA
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There’s no doubt about it, the new Z is a handsome car; crisply surfaced, neatly proportioned and with a star quality several leagues beyond its $49,990 sticker price (in Performance spec; the lesser Sport starts at just $39,990, or £35,000). The Rays wheels (19 inches front and rear, unique to the Performance) don’t hurt, and nor do the nods to the five-decades-old-and-counting Z dynasty: the 350Z-inspired vertical slashes to the front end; the cute S30-inspired headlights; the gorgeous 300ZX-cribbed slatted tail lights.
My suitcase just squeezes under the rear hatch, I drop into the seat’s just-so embrace and, with a clang as cheap-sounding and inconsequential as that of an old Micra, I pull shut the door. But there the flimsiness ends.
Everything else about the Z is engineered with a reassuring heft, from the clutch (an Exedy unit, paired with a carbon propshaft on Performance models) to the gearbox to the way it moves on the road. The six-speed manual slots positively into first (a nine-speed auto is the other option), the traction control’s off before the first Stop sign and, after a few exploratory fizzes of wet-tarmac wheelspin, the Nissan and I feel like best friends.
Highway 1 south, somewhere near Gorda
The coast road from San Francisco to LA is as unimaginative a road choice as Route 66 but far, far better to drive. After a steady start, things rapidly take on an awe-inspiring, almost cinematic scale, the road a serpentine and precarious ledge hundreds of feet above the pounding Pacific, and the whole impossibly magnificent vista rendered in an ever-shifting palette as the rolling mist battles the up-there-somewhere sunlight for supremacy.
The truly great stretch runs Big Sur to Ragged Point – 50 miles to so completely validate the idea that, really, the sports car is the only way to travel as to make you wonder why anyone drives anything else. But drive other stuff they do, from RVs to all-at-sea Camrys, so timing is everything. Overtakes when the road permits buy you clear road when it counts.
The Z monsters the job. With Maps up on CarPlay I’ve some handy intel about the upcoming topography, and the faintly ferocious engine is ever willing with a queue-jumping surge, regardless of gear. Nissan/Infiniti’s twin-turbo, 3.0-litre VR30DDTT unit tweaked for Z duty, the V6 – in stark contrast with, say, the undernourished MX-5 inline-four or the old GT86 Toyota flat-four – almost feels too much for the car, in the best possible way. With 395bhp and 350lb ft of torque, it gives the Z real guts, puts it well clear of the old naturally-aspirated 370Z and sticks it up on a par with Porsche’s 718 Cayman GTS (394bhp and 4.5sec 0-62mph) for straight-line speed.
Lag is all but non-existent, thanks in part to modestly sized turbos. (Smaller turbos should mean reduced boost and power, but speed sensors allow them to spin faster and give more.) Together with the quick-shifting, rev-matching (if you want it) gearbox, this is a powertrain to savour, and to send confidence soaring – as is the Z’s chassis.
With the road to ourselves now, the endless, generously three-dimensional curves begin to stack madly one on top of another, such that the exit from the last bleeds imperceptibly into the braking zone for the next. Just maintaining the posted speed limit becomes an all-consuming challenge, and one the Nissan relishes. There’s all the front-axle response, body control and grip you could reasonably expect, and together they’re enough to offset the overly light and numb steering (a move from the 370Z’s hydraulic rack to electric assistance here is surely no coincidence) and the distracting creak from the seat subframe every time we change direction.
We drive on, blissed out, the world taking on a surreal and otherworldly beauty as the reliable California sunshine begins to cut through the mist, rolling Pacific spray flecks the Nissan’s now shimmering candy-red paint and… Highway 1 blurs into the 101, the traffic builds to a slo-mo maelstrom and our speed drops to a painful, clutch-leg-punishing crawl…
Glendale, early evening
‘Man, is that the new Zee? Holy shit, it looks sweet!’ The LA light’s taking on deeper, richer pre-sunset tones and the shadows on the city’s besieged and lawless concrete freeways grow longer by the second. Finally, after a couple of hours of slow progress (what I’d give for a gear-free and easy-driving electric Ariya right now…), salvation – a Starbucks and a motel.
The guy working the counter is so excited that the drive-thru latte queue grows exponentially longer as we talk. ‘I saw you back it in – that’s my Abarth you’re next to. And it’s a stick-shift?! Holy shit! I was talking to my friends about getting a Supra but they told me I should wait for this.’
To say California’s loved the Z today would be an almighty understatement. The beaming-smile thumbs-up from the apocalypse-ready Jeep (not long now…), the approving nods from the much-modified Infiniti, the kid on the Honda sportsbike – on this evidence Nissan USA will shift every Z it can build.
Europe? We’ll likely never know. ‘A shrinking European sports car market and specific regulations on emissions mean that Nissan was unable to build a viable business case for the introduction of the production version of the next-generation Z-car in Europe,’ read the statement. ‘In Europe, Nissan’s priorities remain its commitment to renew its crossover line-up and accelerate its electrification strategy.’ Head says it’s hard to argue. Heart breaks.
Little Tujunga canyon road, Angeles Crest
Photographer Bob Kerian grew up on these roads and it explains one or two things. (It should also fire within you a raging jealousy because, for all the UK’s fine tarmac, there is nothing – and I mean nothing – that bears comparison with these roads, high in the empty, sun-soaked hills of Angeles Crest.)
Mostly it explains why he routinely wins trackdays in his found-in-a-back-yard Lotus Elise, and why he’s both bemused and bored by my attempts to run these frankly outrageous stretches of tarmac at speed. Imagine every great corner from every great racetrack you’ve ever driven or wanted to drive, plus a couple of thousand curves you won’t see anywhere else, randomly and ceaselessly spat at you at a machine-gun rate of one every 200 yards. For half an hour at a time. With nothing out here to get in your way or spoil your fun. Got that? Now lob in some outrageous cambers and camber shifts, the occasional lump or surface-change lip like a dropped steel girder and some vicious frost-scarring on the exposed stretches.
‘I used to race my Scirocco up here every weekend,’ Kerian tells me in a lookout layby. The Z’s brakes and exhausts tick cool as birds of prey wheel lazily overhead. Outside the car, the 34° heat hits like a docker’s left hook. ‘I tuned the motor pretty hard but what made the difference was a set of Konis.’
Mostly the Z copes admirably with the threefold challenges of my ambition, its modest R&D budget (the fundamental monocoque and suspension are 370Z-based, albeit braced and with revised geometry) and these wicked roads. But yesterday’s fears – namely that the unadjustable suspension was suspiciously pliant, that the light steering lacked meat or a voice, and that mass has no upsides on planet sports car – are realised when push comes to shove.
The route up to Wilson observatory is simply too tight for the Z, which isn’t a big car but starts to feel it just as soon as the road width drops and the corners get all fiddly and second gear. There’s a reluctance to the way the car slows on the middle pedal, and to the swing of that long nose into each new apex, that fails to inspire, not to mention a smudge of understeer which, while easily pushed through with a lift and undoubtedly reassuring in the faster stuff, soon makes you wish it just didn’t exist in the first place.
Better are the surreally quick Tujunga Canyon roads, and here the Z hits some pretty wild highs. Snug in that rear-set cockpit, pulling gears like a movie car chase, you take turns pitching the engine and chassis against the road’s at-times brutal climbs and its tortuous twists and turns. The V6, with its turbo torque and frenzied last 2000rpm, never fails to hurl the Z forward with an intoxicating weightlessness – and, via the limited-slip diff, give the rear Bridgestones a really hard time on corner exit. Shame it sounds like a Dyson Airblade. And while the suspension copes with big ridges and bumps tackled straight and true, hit them on the wonk mid-corner and the whole plot goes wayward for at least a heartbeat too long, the damping taking a stroke or two to settle (as Kerian fishes for another cheesy puff and gazes out of the side window, still bored).
Nissan Z: verdict
In philosophy and execution, the 2023 Z is Z as it always has been, the thrills it delivers unsophisticated and uncomplicated and no less valid for that. Deeply handsome, wildly powerful and engaging to hustle, it makes no apologies for its budget trim and spade’s-a-spade dynamic honesty. It won’t flatter you with perfect PDK shifts or vice-free mid-engined handling, but that’s as it should be. You shift the gears, you manage the mass and you tease that V6-stuffed nose into bends just as hard as it’ll go. And that’s why you’ll likely go home in your $40,000 Nissan feeling like a million dollars.