2009 Nissan GT-R: The Godzilla paradox

I know what you want from me. You think I'm just your little word slut, that I'm here to arouse you with steamy descriptions of the new and instantly legendary Nissan GT-R. You want me to parade around in frilly verbiage, like: "The acceleration of the twin-turbo, all-wheel-drive, 480-hp GT-R is much like a 50-yard field goal in the NFL, wherein your butt is the football." Sigh. I feel so used.

But I'm not going to do that, see? I'm not going to say that Nissan's appallingly fast, superbly balanced GT-R sports car is a Ferrari killer, and for a fraction of the price (an MSRP of around $70,000, though dealers can charge what they want, and will).

I refuse to be drawn into comparisons between the Porsche GT2 — a $200,000 street racer with suspension settings by Torquemada — and this serene, effortlessly livable, all-weather coupe that, inconveniently for the top-line Porsche, matches it step for step.

It matters a little, but not a lot, that the GT-R is within a second or two (7 minutes, 38 seconds) of the production-car lap record at Germany's fabled Nurburgring. After all, most Americans think the Nurburgring is a lobster dish.

Why? Because, for all its pants-ripping performance, the GT-R is surprisingly — amazingly — not all that exciting to drive. Oh yeah, there's epic velocity here, and yet, because there are so many layers of electronic self-preservation, there isn't much frisson or fear. Without fear, there is no fun.

Nissan doesn't even blush. Here's a direct quote from the product briefing: "GT-R offers supercar performance to a broad range of customers for the first time without intimidation."

Despite the GT-R's official nickname, "Godzilla," it's more like 2 tons of fluffy kitten.

Right about now legions of fanboys are throwing down their Sony PlayStation controllers to fire off strongly worded, if badly spelled, e-mails of outrage and dissent. The GT-R's cult status comes courtesy of the video game Gran Turismo, which introduced American audiences to Japan's only true supercar. (Previously known as the Skyline GT-R, several generations of the car have appeared in Japan over the past 20 years.)

The new model — which in the past few years has been repeatedly sighted in prototype testing around the Nurburgring like some 193-mph Brigadoon — now has its own distinct sheet metal, so the Skyline part of the name has been dropped. It is the first GT-R model to come to the United States.

What's fascinating about the GT-R project is just how much Japanese national pride it has come to represent. Nissan's chief creative officer and GT-R guru Shiro Nakamura insisted that the design reflect Japanese culture and avoid aping the razor-cut European exoticism of Ferrari and Lamborghini. And so the GT-R's bluff, blocky masses and angular lines, inspired by the robots — oh, excuse me — mecha mobile suits in the "Gundam" anime series. Words cannot describe how awesome this is, if you are 11.

About as pretty as a meat mallet, the GT-R sure does look menacing in person. Its most distinctive features are the dramatic "aero-blade" air extractors aft of the front wheel wells and the fierce glowering headlamps drawn back in a scowl like a Kabuki mask (or Cindy McCain). The underbody is faired in to reduce lift — the car has significant aero downforce at speed. And coefficient of drag is only 0.27.

Another surprise: This is a big car (almost 10 inches longer than a Corvette). And it's heavy (nearly two tons).

This is a lot of automobile. Beginning with the engine: a hand-built and blueprinted 3.8-liter, twin-turbocharged V6 putting out 480 horsepower. At a minimum. Motor Trend's resident skeptic Frank Markus, puzzled that the GT-R was outperforming lighter and more powerful cars like the Porsche 911 Turbo, put a GT-R on a dynamometer. He concluded the engine is producing at least 507 horsepower and likely a lot more. Given my quarter-mile trap speed (the poor man's dyno) of 120.0 mph, I estimate more like 530.

The big crank is connected to a six-speed, dual-clutch gearbox in a rear transaxle/all-wheel-drive transfer case. Typically, 100 percent of engine torque is directed at the rear wheels. If the AWD system's cybernetics detect wheel slip, big yaw moments or other kinds of slipping and sliding, it will step in, rerouting up to 50 percent of engine torque to the front wheels while coordinating with the angels of the stability control system.

The powertrain ends with four gorgeous 20-inch Rays Engineering wheels wrapped in spec-built, nitrogen-filled Bridgestones.

It all gets pretty nerdy from here. Computer-controlled adaptive suspension. Race-threshold settings for transmission, traction and stability control. And a launch-control system that allows the mother of all torque-brake takeoffs: There's a brief moan as the highly excited gear packs sluice torque fore and aft, but there's no drama, no wheel spin, no choking incense of clutch. The GT-R simply begins moving like some pneumatically powered experiment in a physics lab. Your guts and wits catch up a beat or two later.

On the day I drove the car at Fernley Raceway, near Reno, Nev., testers were getting 0-60 mph launches in the 3.1-second range. That's as quick as any car I've ever driven.

By the way, the car is built like the battleship Yamato. I mean, it's solid.

So, what's the problem? It's not really a problem, just a matter of character. This car has been engineered to produce astonishing performance numbers. Driven by something less than the finest drivers in the world — and that would include me — the margins of safety and control are so broad that it actually makes the car uninvolving. Say what you want about the Porsche GT2: When you drive that car hard, you're in the fight for your existential soul. You are hanging on for a life made ever more dear by the peril.

Around the track in the GT-R, at first I thought, "Oh, wow, I'm driving my butt off. I'm a genius behind the wheel." Soon, though, I realized the car was doing most of the work, saving me from mistakes. The GT-R is the ultimate self-correcting mechanism. No matter how wrong you get your line or how bad you fumble your braking, simply turn the wheel where you want to go and mat the throttle. In an instant, the computers and AWD riddle out a solution and off you go. That doesn't happen in a Ferrari.

And so, the paradox of the Japanese supercar that does everything better but is still somehow less fun.