Kaizo Industries Brings the Classic Skyline GT-R Into America One Piece at a Time
By John Pearley Huffman
Go to a Nissan dealer, hand over a massive wad of cash and you will (eventually) drive off in a new "R35" 2009 Nissan GT-R. For the GT-R fanatic, however, that's too dang ordinary. For the hard-core, the R35 may as well be an Altima ? albeit an Altima that rips from zero to 60 in 3.3 seconds and laps the N?rburgring quicker than a Porsche 911 Turbo.
Nope, for the extreme Nissan nut, the real GT-Rs are still the Skyline GT-Rs, built with the steering wheel on the wrong side. After all, great as the R35 is, its ancestors ? the R32, R33 and R34 ? created the GT-R myth and earned the glory.
Built from 1989-2003, these three generations of Japan's greatest supercar were all equipped with Nissan's Super HICAS electronic four-wheel steering system, the now legendary ATTESA E-TS Electronic Torque Split 4WD System and a twin-turbocharged 2.6-liter DOHC 24-valve six, ridiculously underrated at 280 horsepower. Although their profile peaked back in 2003 when Paul Walker's character drove an R34 in the cinematic classic 2 Fast 2 Furious, demand is always high.
But buying a Nissan Skyline GT-R in the U.S. has never been easy. They were never really supposed to escape Japan, and Motorex, the company that once regularly imported Skyline GT-Rs into America, has imploded in a whole soap opera's worth of complications and legal turmoil.
So what's a Skyline GT-R lover to do? Call Daryl Alison. (714) 241-9087. He'll get you the Skyline GT-R of your dreams, some assembly required.
Meet Daryl Alison
At 43, Alison is tall, lean, muscular and shaves his head ? like a bouncer on Jerry Springer. He's a former cop (an Orange County sheriff's deputy to be precise) with a lifetime jones for high-performance cars; a whole slew of businesses built around them (including JSpecConnect.com); a warehouse in Costa Mesa, California, hard up against John Wayne Airport; and a slightly goofball purebred boxer named Julio who shadows his every move. Yes, he's the same guy who got the first R35 GT-R onto American streets and then put it on a chassis dyno for Inside Line.
He's also the principal behind Kaizo Industries' presence on this side of the Pacific. "Kaizo," Alison explains, "means 'modified' in Japanese. It's a company in Kamakura City which remanufactures body shells."
It's those remanufactured body shells that are the key element in bringing an R32, R33 or R34 over to North America. Once Kaizo has done the work necessary to make the shell ready for America ? raising the door beams, reinforcing the A-pillar-to-cowl interface, verifying that all the glass meets DOT standards, beefing up the seatbelt anchor points and removing non-compliant lighting equipment ? the company puts its own 17-character serial number on it and it's ready for export. But since it's missing an engine, transmission and differentials, it ships as an automotive component, not as a complete car. In other words, it's just a part.
"And the government," Alison says, "doesn't care that much about parts." As proof he offers up the EPA's own online statement regarding the importation of "kit cars" and their components.
The nut of that government page comes, however, down to this passage: "The production, sale and importation of automotive bodies alone (i.e., no chassis, engine or transmission) are not regulated by EPA since such units are not considered 'motor vehicles' under the Clean Air Act. EPA form 3520-1 is not required for imported automotive bodies. A motor vehicle from which the engine has been removed is still a motor vehicle and is not considered a body."
The Kaizo method of importation is, generally speaking, also the way Alison was able to bring in a pair of Japanese-market R35s before the U.S. version was ready for sale. However, in the case of the R35, the shells came from Nissan and not through Kaizo.
Some Assembly Required
Kaizo is constantly hunting down bodies for remanufacture but, Alison says, it has high standards about what it buys. "They go out and acquire mint cars at auctions," Alison explains, "and they reject many bodies. The R34 bodies we get here are perfect cars. Finding an [older] R33 or R32 that hasn't been beaten up is a lot tougher."
A solid R34 body will run somewhere between $50,000 on the low side and somewhere just above $60,000 from the primo nee-plus ultra-super body. R33s and R32s are rarer, but still cheaper, with the R33s running around the mid-$30,000 range when they're available.
And for that money, what Kaizo delivers is a right-hand-drive Skyline GT-R body with a full interior and all the expected DOT-approved glazing. But there isn't any lighting and only a big hole under the hood where an engine should be.
Theoretically, you could take your Kaizo-certified body home and make a coffee table out of it. Most buyers will, however, eventually want to drive that body.
"There's a handful of companies that sell drivetrains," Alison explains. And once you acquire a drivetrain, all you have to do is contract with a shop to have it all bolted in. With any luck that shop will know what they're doing.
"I intentionally distance myself from downstream," says Alison. And that's likely the best way to ensure that everything remains legal. It also means that it's unlikely that any Kaizo-sourced GT-R will be a "numbers matching" collector's item.
It also means that you don't necessarily have to install a RB26DETT 2.6-liter, twin-turbocharged straight-6 and all-wheel-drive system into your Kaizo-rubbed Skyline GT-R shell. "I know one guy who put a VQ35 [3.5-liter V6] from a Z-car into one and added a Stillen supercharger," Alison reports. And there are rumors of at least one R34 running around with a 5.7-liter LS6 small-block V8 from a C5-generation Corvette Z06 under its hood.
Registration Nation
"It's no different than building a dune buggy," Alison says about Kaizo cars. "And they register in most states as 'specially constructed vehicles.' It's the same process they use to bring in the Noble M400."
Of course "most" states is not the same as "all," and the intricacies of every state vary. Some states, somewhere between 10 and 15, are notoriously easy to get a registration for practically anything in. Others, like California, have reputations that may be more daunting than the reality (though showing up around 5 a.m. at a DMV office on January 2 to get one of the new year's allotment of 500 special construction exemptions for the Golden State is an adventure).
Whatever state, it's unlikely that a Kaizo GT-R will register as a Nissan. When the body shell arrives here, it comes with a Manufacturer's Statement of Origin (MSO) that rebadges the car as a Kaizo, and that's likely how it will register in whatever state it finds itself plopped down in.
Beyond that, it will likely register for the model year that Kaizo fortified the body, not the year Nissan originally built the car.
But the Kaizo process is legal and there's no reason the R34 shouldn't register successfully in any state. As long as, that is, all the various rules about emissions and the like are followed scrupulously.
The Big Bottom Line
So the big day arrives and the UPS guy dumps a big crate containing a Kaizo R34 body on your front lawn ? and another crate with whatever drivetrain you've decided should go inside it. You tear open the crates like a 6-year-old getting his first slot car set and spend the next couple of weeks Velcro-ing the two of them together. Everything goes great until about halfway through the process when you finally stop long enough to consider whether it's worth it.
As this is written, no one really knows what the demand for R32, R33 and R34 Skyline GT-Rs will be going forward. It may well be that the R35 is so awesome (and it is awesome) that even the most committed R34 fan dumps that box. Suddenly Craigslist is full of cast-off R32s, R33s and R34s that have already made it here, and prices collapse.
Conversely, it could be that the R35 just amps up the market for the older cars so that bringing them in Kaizo-style is even more profitable than cloning Hemi 'Cudas.
The bottom line today is that there are already at least a few hundred Skyline GT-Rs in America, and the easiest approach to getting one for yourself is to buy one of those when they come up for sale. And it's likely to be the cheapest method, too.
But for those who want a Skyline GT-R no one else has ever driven on these fair shores, there's the Kaizo way.
