2009 Nissan GT-R Premium, R35

This 2009 Nissan GT-R Premium is finished in Gun Metallic over black and is offered from Kyalami by kyalami_r35, about this seller, its second owner and the keeper of the car for eleven years. It is a first year R35 with the 3.8 litre VR38DETT and the rear mounted six speed dual clutch, and it shows 74,200km.

The lot is unusual in what it publishes. The GT-R records its own use, and the ECU and TCM data were pulled and printed during the pre-sale service in June and are in the document gallery. The printout shows 41 launch control activations, two over-rev events both in zone 4, dated 2016 and 2019, and the stored fault history. The seller published it in full rather than summarising it, which is the reason a bidder can read this car's history rather than take a description of it.

The map history is documented alongside it. A stage 1 map was fitted by a Johannesburg tuner in April 2016 at 41,600km and the ECU was returned to a factory map in September 2023 at 69,400km, both invoiced. The mechanical file covers the items this car is known for: turbo inlet pipes, coolant hoses and thermostat in 2018, the transfer case actuator and solenoid with all four wheel bearings in 2021, and transmission fluid and filter at four separate services including the pre-sale one.

The flaws the seller states are the launch and over-rev record above, original clutch packs at 74,200km with a rebuild as a known future cost, a stone chipped front bumper and bonnet edge that has never been resprayed, and front discs that have lipped and are near the end of their life. Every question put at intake was answered. Nothing was declined.

The R35 arrived in 2007 and ended the argument. A 3.8 litre twin turbo V6, a rear mounted dual clutch gearbox, four wheel drive and a set of lap times that embarrassed cars costing four times as much. It was assembled in a clean room in Tochigi by a small number of named technicians, each engine hand built and plaqued, and Nissan sold it as an engineering statement rather than a luxury one.

The first year cars carry a specific piece of history. Nissan fitted launch control and then took the position that using it voided the drivetrain warranty, because the transmissions were failing under it, and the car logs every activation. That log is still there fifteen years later, and it is the closest thing in the used performance market to a machine written service history that the seller cannot edit.

It matters more here than in most markets. South Africa has no national vehicle history record, so provenance normally rests on NATIS, stamps and invoices, all of which are documents a person writes. A GT-R log is written by the car. A bidder who reads one is reading evidence of a kind that almost nothing else on this site can offer, which is why publishing it is worth more than any adjective in a description.