Stunning Nissan GT-R wins on debut

Fans of racing game Gran Turismo will be familiar with the series which pits the most radical Japanese super cars against each other

Boasting performance to rival a Porsche 911 for half the price, the GT-R is the ultimate road car pin-up.

Trackside's Keith Collantine reckons the racing version is even more special.

New racing cars often take a couple of events to get up to speed. Teams usually expect to spend the first races of a new model's life ironing out set-up niggles and figuring out how to optimise its set-up.

The first clue the racing Nissan GT-R would not need this sort of treatment came when two examples of the new car locked out the front row of the grid for the first race of the 2008 Japanese Super GT championship.

Fans of racing game Gran Turismo will be familiar with the series which pits the most radical Japanese super cars against each other.

The race brought an almost perfect result for the team: Satoshi Motoyama and Benoit Treluyer stormed to victory in their GT-R. Motoyama passed one of the sister GT-Rs late in the race to win.

The pair were backed up by Michael Krumm and Masataka Yanagida in another of the Nissan supercars. A fourth GT-R filled the fifth place spot.

It didn't go entirely to plan - one GT-R ran sixth in the closing stages but retired on lap 42 with technical problems.

And the fifth GT-R was eliminated in a crash on the first lap of the Suzuka circuit, which hosted Formula from 1987-2006.

Their highest placed rival was Lexus, whose SC430 ended the race third. The GT-R looks like it has a long and successful racing career ahead of it.