What is that, the 32nd time you've made a post that ended in "....because the GT-R is boring to drive." Thinly veiled sarcasm taken, give it a break already.

June 30, 2008, 2:28 pm
How Much Power Does the Nissan GT-R Really Have?

By Ezra Dyer

Tags: gt r, horsepower, Nissan

It seems like the only time you hear about car companies fudging horsepower numbers, it’s when they’re busted advertising more beans than are actually present in the under-hood burrito. Mazda got in trouble for exaggerating the 2001 Miata’s power output. Ford had to recall the 1999 SVT Mustang Cobra when owners realized its motor fell about 20 horsepower short of its official numbers. In the early 2000’s, Hyundai offered its customers extended roadside assistance and warranties after several models suffered double-digit horsepower deficits.

I have a theory on where all those phantom ponies went: They’re under the hood of the new Nissan GT-R.

Like those other cars, the GT-R’s stated power — 480 horsepower — is a long way from reality. But in the case of the Nissan, the truth is that the car seems to have more power than they’re letting on. The question is, how much more?

Nissan knows, but the company is not saying. Peter Bedrosian, regional project manager for product planning, said that Nissan tests every GT-R production engine on a dynamometer, then records the horsepower and torque for that particular car.

“And can owners find out how much power their car’s motor puts out?” I asked.

That’s a no. I presume that the power printouts are sealed in a lead capsule and buried deep inside Mount Fuji under dead of night. So we’ll just have to make an educated guess.

Thanks to the principle of substitution, we can look at several aspects of the GT-R’s performance and deduce roughly what kind of firepower would be required to accomplish such feats.

For a corollary, the former N.B.A. point guard Spud Webb could dunk (and maybe, for all I know, still can). Spud Webb is 5-foot-7. If Webb told you his vertical leap was only 20 inches, you would conclude that Mr. Webb was understating his abilities and that someone of his height would need at least a 40-inch vertical to win the 1986 NBA Slam Dunk Contest, which he did.

Likewise, the Nissan GT-R laps Germany’s Nürburgring Nordschleife in 7 minutes 29 seconds, which is very nearly the fastest time ever recorded by a production car. For reference, the Corvette Z06, which has 505 horsepower and weighs a whopping 700 pounds less than the GT-R, is 13 seconds slower, with a time of 7 minutes 42 seconds. So, the car with 25 fewer horsepower and 700 more pounds of weight is much, much faster than its rival? Something is rotten in the state of the S.A.E. horsepower laboratories.

I’ll grant you that there are many variables involved in a lap of the Nordschleife, and Nissan will point out that the GT-R has a sophisticated all-wheel-drive system that allows it to power neatly out of corners, while the Z06 is rear-wheel drive. But still … 13 seconds? We could presume that, based on this statistic alone, the GT-R must have at least as much power as the Z06, about 500 horses. But that still wouldn’t be close.

A clearer picture emerges at the drag strip. Basically, your quarter-mile time is influenced by a host of factors, most importantly the success of your launch off the line. But trap speed — the speed at which you finish the quarter-mile — is closely tied to horsepower and a car’s power-to-weight ratio.

It’s algebra: If you know your car’s weight, and you know the speed it reached in a quarter-mile, you can pretty much predict the amount of power required to produce that trap speed. Trap speed doesn’t lie. And the GT-R’s trap speeds give lie to that 480-horsepower rating.

The GT-R can hit 122 or 123 miles per hour in the quarter-mile. It weighs about 4,000 pounds, with driver. There are many calculators and equations devoted to divining horsepower numbers, and given this weight and trap speed, most of them peg the GT-R’s output between 550 horsepower on the conservative end and 580 horsepower on the “maybe on a cool day with a tailwind” side. But I would eat my time slips if this car doesn’t have at least 550 horsepower.

So why won’t Nissan just fess up? Maybe it’s for insurance reasons. Maybe it’s to appease the Japanese government, which regards the GT-R as a pavement-eating menace to civilized mankind. Or maybe it’s because it’s just more fun not to know. It adds to the legend. Because when someone asks you how much power your car makes, hard stats are boring. It’s much more entertaining to say, “480 horsepower, officially,” then, in a conspiratorial tone, confide, “but everyone knows it’s got more.”