A JAPANESE Touring Car Championship Nissan GT-R that was raced in period by Mark Skaife has sold at auction in Japan for almost half a million dollars.
The car, built and raced by Team Taisan in 1991, was among the lots in the Collection Car online auction that formed part of the Tokyo Auto Salon 2022 custom car show.
Skaife raced the car at the 1991 Macau Grand Prix in the Guia touring car support race, and turned some fast practice laps at that year’s JTC season finale at Fuji before team politics saw him benched for the rest of the weekend.
The car is unusual in that it is the only Japanese-built GT-R to be raced in period by an Australian pilot; conversely, it is also the only GT-R that Skaife raced which was not built by Gibson Motorsport.
After being passed in when it was last auctioned in 2018, the GT-R was sold for 39,018,100 yen including taxes (approximately AU$477,700) when the auction closed at the weekend.
According to the car’s previous auction listing in 2018, Taisan built a new car for the 1992 season – a car that now resides in Nissan’s heritage collection – while this machine went on to tackle the South East Asian Touring Car Championship in 1993.
Restored back to its 1991 JTC livery, the car retains its unique water-cooling system for the brakes that incorporated a large tank in the cockpit next to the driver, however it is fitted with a later N1-spec RB26DETT engine rather than the original Group A-spec unit.
