Hanawa probably didn’t know it at the time, but grief-stricken Nissan insiders stuck in the denial stage were hell-bent on ressurrecting a new, leaner and meaner Z. “Internally, we called it a ‘gestation period’,” says John Yukawa, a senior engineer. One team of 10 or so engineers, reporting to a senior vice president, began secret “after five” meetings. Their project, code-named MS for Middle Sport, sought to fashion an inexpensive Z car from a platform designed for the Silvia, Nissan’s top-selling coupe. A year later, they presented a hand-built prototype to Hanawa. He spun it around a test track, said he “liked it a lot” and ordered them to conduct “further studies.” “It had a great shape,” says Yutaka Katayama, father of the 240Z, who also test-drove the Middle Sport that day. By then, however, Nissan’s financial crisis was well underway. Nothing came of the MS project.
With Datsun car clubs across the United States keeping the embers alive, Nissan’s U.S. division decided to restore a handful of used 240Zs. It was able to sell them in dealerships for about $30,000, further intensifying interest in classic Zs. The U.S. design team in San Diego, California, even took it upon themselves to build a Z-inspired concept car that looked strikingly similar to the original. They displayed this swept-back creation at the Detroit Auto Show in early 1999. In hindsight, company executives now admit, it was more a public-relations gambit than a realistic prototype. “We threw it together,” said one executive. “We wanted to show that Nissan was still alive.”
It is. And after six years in “gestation,” the next Z car is expected to be ready for the showroom by mid-2002. The irony, of course, is that it took a takeover by foreigners (the French auto firm Renault) to save Japan’s preeminent road machine. These days, Nissan is once again surprising people, rather than the other way around. Last October “Mad” Mike paid another visit. This time, Nissan took the burly Texan to see its new Z. His reaction: “Holy s–t!”
