![]() ![]() Canada also got their market launch that month, while Europe became the GT-R's third global market in March 2009. July 7, 2008, saw the US market receive the car as a 2009 model. The JDM launch took place on December 6, honoring Ghosn's promise of a 2007 debut. Ghosn bought the very first example for himself. The GT-R was instantly an icon, and in November, more than 3,000 pre-orders were already received. It's since gone faster and faster numerous times, achieving lap records worldwide, but at the time, beating a Porsche on its home turf was incredible. Just before unveiling the production version at the 2007 Tokyo Motor Show, Nissan showed a clip of the GT-R lapping the Nurburgring in 7:38 minutes, beating the 911 Turbo despite timing its run in wet conditions. In 2005, the GT-R Proto Concept was revealed to showgoers at the Tokyo Motor Show, previewing what 80-90% of the production version would look like. After some 18 months and over 2,000 wind tunnel runs, a stylish look was decided upon that exceeded the team's goals with a C d =0.27. Later, a CFD program made wind tunnel testing easier. He asked the chassis department to lower the frame rails as low as the passenger compartment to eliminate transition and smooth airflow beneath the car. Suzuka realized that a different approach was needed. But even with the involvement of the car's exterior designers (Hirohisa Ono and Masato Taguchi), the drag coefficient could not be dropped below 0.32. What the engineers learned resulted in two refined models of 40% scale, one of which was used to develop the GT-R while the other became the Nissan Skyline V35/Infiniti G35 test mule. In August 2004, those three models in 1/4 scale form were taken to the wind tunnel and tested around 300 times. The goal was an unprecedented C d=0.28 or lower, but this proved challenging. After whittling down the original 80+ sketches submitted as part of the internal design competition, design boss Nakamura chose 12, of which three became models used in wind tunnel testing. As part of the aerodynamic development we touched on earlier, Nissan recruited the services of its best engineers, including the man who developed its successful Le Mans prototypes, Yoshi Suzuka.
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