The customer had put 61,000 km on this car. He'd done the Fuji touge, driven it to work every day for six years, and hadn't sold it during any of the three engine platforms Nissan has iterated the R35 through. The kit was not a facelift. It was, in his phrasing, the next chapter.
Every panel was fitted to the car in Uppsala, in person. He flew over for the fitting week, and we spent five days going panel-by-panel, marking gaps in chalk pen and then filing the flare edges by hand to sit against his specific bodywork. R35s are hand-finished at the factory and no two are perfectly identical below 2 mm; a kit that fits one perfectly rarely fits another perfectly. Fitting on the actual car is the only way that works.
The rear wing is a tunable element — three angle-of-attack presets from cruise to circuit, adjustable in about 90 seconds with a single tool. On the customer's request, we set it up so preset 2 is his everyday setting, preset 1 is motorway, and preset 3 is the day he books Fuji. It's a small piece of engineering, and it's the one he sends us photographs of most often.
The car went home on the ship out of Rotterdam in October. He drove it off the truck in Osaka, took it straight to a car meet, and — his message read — 'nobody recognised it. Which is the point.'
