General Comments:
I'll never forget the day I test drove the Skyline with my brother. My brother and I are passionate about cars and really love driving, so we were both very excited. We'd both looked at around 5 Skylines before I looked at the one I ended up buying. The 1st thing that struck me as I started the car up and slowly pulled out of the sellers driveway, was how incredibly smooth and comfortable it was. The clutch and gearbox were so smooth it was almost effortless. We went onto a dual carriageway and the seller said to me "OK, now put your foot down, hard." I did so and after that I had a permanent grin on my face until the test drive was over. I was literally pinned to my seat, it seemed to have so much torque! My previous car to the Skyline was a mk1 MR2, which was great fun and a joy to drive, but obviously the level of power was quite different, so the Skyline perhaps seemed so fast to me at that time.
I was pretty much sold then and there on the car and I bought it. Coming home on the motorway, a week later when I picked it up, I got to test the high end torque more effectively and I was not disappointed at all. The Skyline glided effortlessly past cars in the fast lane for the whole journey home and I still couldn't wipe that d@mn smile off my face!
I owned the Skyline for almost 3 years and it was solidly reliable, fun to drive, extremely comfortable and performed with excellent. Of course, it's not the the fastest car on the roads, but when you consider that for around £4.5k, you can get a car that I consider to be so well balanced with performance/reliability/comfort/fun, it really is incredible.
I truly regret trading my Skyline in for a Lotus Elise. I have also written a review of the Elise, but that is another story. Having owned both cars, the Skyline is 10 times the car the Elise is, and a 3rd of the price.
It was a great deal of fun to get involved with modifying and improving the car too. When I bought it, the Skyline already had an induction kit, boost controller, boost gauge and a nice loud dump valve on it. I added stainless steel exhaust and a decat pipe, and the sound I got from the exhaust was a real head turning and exciting sound. I hardly had to spend any money on it at all to get it to a level where it wasn't far off 300bhp, and was so much fun to drive.
When people were in the car with me, they often commented on how comfortable it was, I believe the Skyline is a car that is equally suited to quite a few different demographics of potential car owners, for example, it's just as good as a family car with loads of room in the back, as it is as a cruiser for long journeys, or even, at it's best, when driven as a sports car.
I've just traded my Lotus Elise in after only 2 months of ownership. I was extremely tempted to get another Skyline, but in the end I've gone for something a little different, but still the same category of Japanese sports car - a Mitsubishi GTO twin turbo. I will write a review of this also after I've driven it around and owned the car for at least a month, to get the best feel of it.
To anyone considering a Skyline, I hope this has been helpful and I can't recommend buying one enough, it was truly a joy to own and drive. The only trouble I had was convincing people not to buy into the stereotypes people seem to have of a boy racer driving one of these!
To sum up, the Skyline was incredible fun, interesting, comfortable, solidly reliable, and most of all, the performance was fantastic for the money you pay.
