Road Trip Warriors
autoX|April 2017

Sure, 4am wake-up calls are no fun. But when you have a quartet such as this lying in wait, well, then the incentives are pretty good – wouldn’t you say?

Road Trip Warriors

The plan is to head for the hills. A 600-kilometre round-trip. One day! Just like that.

Well, for the sheer thrill of the journey if you must know. The question is, can we really do it in exotic machines such as these. Are they merely garage queens, or can they really get out there and get their hands (or tyres) dirty?

Well, there was only one way to find out…

Nissan GT-R

The Weapon

Ishan Raghava

There’s a 70-kilometre stretch of mountain road in Himachal that’s one of our absolute favourites. It goes from Kumarhatti to Nahan, and it offers some of the best switchbacks in the world – and with stunning views to boot! Normally, we would take the Himalayan Expressway into the foothills and then turn off towards Kumarhatti – no problem. But the trouble was that large stretches of the Himalayan Expressway are being expanded. So, for the moment at least, it’s no place for a supercar.

So, the only way for us to get there would be through the depths of Haryana. Well, even better I suppose if we really want to test these machines. Fortunately, before we got to the country roads through the mustard fields of North India we got to stretch the legs of the GT-R on the highway…

Now, just to give you a sense of the kind of machine we’re dealing with – its 3.8-litre twin-turbo charged engine pumps out a liberal 562bhp and 637Nm of torque. Nissan claims a 0-to-100 time of 2.7 seconds. Pair this with a slick-shifting six-speed dual-clutch gearbox and a rather trick all-wheel drive system and the GT-R’s performance, no matter the conditions, is pretty much unbeatable.

This story is from the April 2017 edition of autoX.

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This story is from the April 2017 edition of autoX.

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