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Nissan also repurposed S30 240Z for its rally racing whims, which has always seemed a little weird to us given how sexy and sporty the Z is seen as. But with motorsports versions of the platform's L24 inline-6 under the hood, the car did well, winning the prestigious Safari Rally in '71 and again in '73, proving the S30's mettle. As a result, more and more drivers began driving the Z-car at rallies.

Above any other motorsport of the '70s, Nissan staked its claim as a top-tier brand in professional rally racing. The success it saw in the '80s was a carryover from efforts that began in the '50s and '60s and matured the decade after, and the RWD Datsun Bluebird was sort of where it all started. This battered beaut (we love how Nissan left these cars as is, warts and all) was the 510 that broke through at the '70 East-African Safari Rally and gave Nissan its first big internationally recognized wins in the sport.

Nissan's first FF was the Cherry, and it came with the same A10 and A12 inline-4 engines that were in the Sunny. This one was prepped for the Minor Touring class of the '72 Fuji Speedway Grand Champion series, another support race, and was armed with a 1.3L A12 making just under 150hp.

The '80s had Super Silhouettes, but the '70s launched Tokusyu Touring Car racing, more commonly referred to as TS race, a special series of support competitions at Fuji International Speedway that featured little cars with little engines (well, maybe not so little for Japan in the '70s). Like Silhouettes, these things were wildly popular, and Nissan through its Datsun brand did incredibly well in the motorsport, especially with FR Sunny Coupes like the ones above, which won TS championships from '71 through '74 and also in '77, '79, '80 and '82.

The '80s also saw the start of Nissan's prototype racing endeavors with the introduction of the Lola Cars-chassis GTP ZX-Turbo for the IMSA series in the US. Developed by Electramotive Engineering, the sleek racer was equipped with a turbo VG30 V-6 making 641hp, motivation similar to what came in the R85V in '86 (top photo above), Nissan's debut into the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The VG30T era gave way to the turbo VRH V-8 phase later in the '80s, first in 3.0L and then in 3.5L form, while Lola and March Engineering seemed to alternate in chassis development as Nissan challenged in Japan and around the globe.

The '80s were a culmination of sorts for Nissan rally racing. In the early part of the decade the Violet continued to shine, especially in the hands of Shekhar Mehta, who drove a Nissan A10 (first as a Datsun 160J, then as a Violet GT) to four Safari Rally titles in a row, concluding with the victory in '82 when the Group 4 ruleset was phased out. The latter wins came with LZ20B 2.0L inline-4 power in the engine bay, but that same year everyone got a glimpse at the future with the S110 and its FJ motivation. An S110 Silvia finished third (with an LZ20B) in the '82 Safari Rally, while over in the WRC the above S110 240RS was built for a little something called Group B competition, outfitted with a 2.3L FJ24 generating 240hp plus from the factory. Later in the '80s, VG30 V-6-powered 300ZX and S12 Silvia made a splash in rally.

Elsewhere in touring cars, the range-topping '87 Skyline GTS-R homologation special took dead aim at Group A racing and carried on the line's legacy in the category after the R30 began it a generation earlier. This particular HR31 was built by Nissan Motorsports Europe for the European Touring Car Championship and was propelled by an inline-6 RB but not the one you're thinking of - these racing machines sported RB20DET-Rs, a 2.0L version of the straight-6.

The no-Fs-given approach to car creation made Super Silhouettes popular, so popular that singer/actor/racer Masahiko "Matchy" Kondo had a K10 March hatchback done up in the boxy widebody style in '82. Nissan took part in the category via Violet (710A10), Bluebird (910), Silvia (S110) and Skyline (R30), and all of them ran similarly built turbocharged LZ20B inline-4 making north of 560hp. (For an updated take on the Tomica R30, check out what Liberty Walk did with an ER34 Skyline 25GT for the '20 Tokyo Auto Salon.)

So much love is heaped on '90s cars that Super Silhouette racers of the '80s nearly always get overlooked, but dude! These things are cool! Super Silhouettes were short lived (raced just in the early part of the decade) and built to Group 5 "Special Production" touring car rules, meaning they were production vehicles with their native engine blocks and limited to 3.0 liters of displacement, and that's pretty much it. Teams could go as crazy as they wanted with every other part of the machine, and by the looks of it they often did. We even read that some engines could reportedly make more power than Formula 1 mills of the time.

As you can probably tell from the ton of sports car prototype racers in the photo gallery, Nissan was heavily involved in both Group C-/GTP- and GT1-spec competition on an international scale in the '90S; they were running in the All Japan Sports Prototype Championship (JSPC), IMSA in America, and the World Endurance Championship/World Sports-Prototype Championship/FIA Sportscar World Championship (so many stupid names) in Europe. Chassis first came from Lola Cars and March Engineering before Nissan started building them on their own and depending on ruleset came with everything from twin-turbo V-8s to the naturally aspirated V-12 you'd find mounted in P35 prototypes. Much success was had in these machines.

The '90s marked the end of the road for Nissan's involvement in the World Rally Championship, even though privateers continued to champion the brand in the WRC and elsewhere well into the future. In the early '90s, Pulsar GTI-R compacts like this one from '92 led the charge, mainly because of the turbo SR20DET under hood (which engineers turned up to make nearly 300hp) and its ATTESA (Advanced Total Traction Engineering System for All) four-wheel-drive system.

Since touring cars are in Nissan's '90s racing DNA, endurance racing is as well, and for it the automaker and its accomplices at NISMO used as their primary weapons Skyline GT-R of both the R32 and R33 variety. The ZEXEL BNR32 ran the Spa 24 Hours in Belgium from '90 to '92, while the no. 23 BCNR33 GT-R LM beneath it (a special version of the R33 GT-R) was part of a two-car 24 Hours of Le Mans effort by NISMO in '95 and '96. It rocked a 2.8-liter RB26 that made almost 600hp and kept its AWD configuration; its counterpart, the no. 22 (buried in the photo gallery), had a somewhat different approach to the French enduro classic, with power from a Group N-spec 400hp RB26DETT and a RWD setup.

In general, touring car racing was pretty big in the '90s around the world and Nissan even saw successes outside of Japan. In the British Touring Car Championship, for example, this SR20DE-motivated Primera GT killed the '99 season, winning an impressive 13 out of 26 races competing against the likes of Volvo S40, Renault Laguna, Vauxhall Vectra, Ford Mondeo and Honda Accord.

The earlier so-called JTC era relied on Group A standards that were an extremely broad, almost sliding scale of specs based partly on stock engine size, and they opened up touring car racing to a lot of platforms. Nissan dominated this stretch of the JTC with the AWD R32 Skyline GT-R and its RB26DETT, which won many races and was used by no fewer than seven teams in '93 when the Group A period ended. The pictured STP Taisan GT-R is the rig that took the second round in '93 and was copiloted by none other than Keiichi "Drift King" Tsuchiya.

As we move backward through time, the Japanese Touring Car Championship (abbreviated to JTC between '85 and '93, expanded to JTCC from '94 to '98) was where a lot of JDM OEMs focused a portion of their works road racing efforts in the '90s, and as the initialisms suggest the series had two distinct eras. The above pictured FWD Primera Camino and Sunny are from the Super Touring formula period of the JTCC, which mandated four-door chassis and naturally aspirated engines limited to 2.0 liters of displacement. If you guessed both of these cars rocked SR20 power, you'd be right, and they mixed it up with Toyota Corona EXiV and Honda Civic Ferio in the series, as well as various Opel and BMW.

There was apparently less straight-6 hate pre-'00 in JGTC GT500, because Nissan and NISMO R34 and R33 Skyline GT-R were able to run versions of the legendary turbo RB26 in competition and were even allowed to punch them out to 2.7 liters later on. In the GT300 class, entries like the Xanavi S14 Silvia above - which featured a 315hp SR20DET inline-4 - were dicing on track with the likes of Toyota MR2 and BMW. (By the way, zoom into each of the photos in the gallery to see how many Volk Racing and SSR wheels you can spot.)

In fact, Nissan used that same racing-only twin-turbo VQ30 mill in the last years of the JGTC in both its GT500 Fairlady Z and earlier Skyline GT-R; that's no typo - at least for one season ('03), Nissan's Super GT GT500 R34 Skyline GT-R were V-6 (and RWD, too, to save weight, but that's not as unusual in motorsport). The Motul Pitwork Skyline GT-R was one such machine, representing the final year of the Skyline GT-R in the series before the Z swooped in.

An evolution of the All Japan Grand Touring Car Championship (JGTC), the Super GT name began being used in '05 and the series today travels to tracks throughout Japan and Asia. Racing is split into two classes, higher horsepower GT500 cars - a category that's been dominated by Japanese OEMs for the last 15 years - and GT300 cars. Since '08, Nissan and its performance division NISMO have campaigned R35 GT-R in Super GT's GT500 class, earning a handful of titles in the process, but in the era directly before it Z33 Fairlady Z (aka the 350Z) were employed.

The specs from each period speak to how racing power plants have evolved over time. For example, the Motul Autech Fairlady Z from '06 pictured above came not with a VQ35 V-6 you'd find in an average Z33 but actually a twin-turbo VQ30DETT due to Super GT regulations. The GT500 formula for today, however, is different, calling for single-turbo inline-4 mills capped at 2.0 liters of displacement. Wanna destroy a GT-R, NSX, or Supra fan boy? Tell them their favorite car is rocking a four banger in Super GT (burn!)

Nissan's virtual Heritage Collection is exhaustive, too, covering decades of car manufacturing going all the way back to the 1920s. It is hours of distraction for obsessive nerds like the staff of SS, and to give our followers a taste of what the online repository has in store, we decided to round up some of our favorite examples from the archive. In fact, the collection is so jam packed, we've chosen to split up this story into two parts, with race cars and motorsports machines here and then later another story looking at special production models, concept cars, and other various fare.

One of the most common flexes among the biggest automakers is to squirrel away examples of their best and rarest work over their history to eventually show off those pieces as an anthology. Not long ago, we received a glimpse at a new exhibit at the Honda Collection Hall in Japan, and much deeper in our past we've been exceedingly fortunate to get to visit places like Nissan's Zama Heritage Car Garage in Kanagawa and the secret stash stored beneath Mazda North American Operations in Irvine, Calif. What happens, though, when in the midst of a global pandemic those places become off limits or at a minimum much less accessible? If fans are lucky, their favorite OEM will have an online analog of their car archives like Nissan's virtual Heritage Collection.

Back in 1969, Ford and Dodge were the front-runners in NASCAR competition. Ford's new Torino fastback that debuted in 1968 was an effective design, but Dodge's Hemi-powered Chargers still had it outgunned. Since NASCAR had banned Ford from using the 427ci SOHC motor, Ford regrouped and decided to come to the track in 1969 with a new engine and a new body.

HOT ROD has long talked about how cool it would be to build a NASCAR-style car for the street. We were hoping to help jump-start a trend, but few people have taken the bait. Rick Stanton, however, did it perfectly. There are street cars with the paint, wheels, and stripped interior to evoke the raw power of '60s NASCAR race cars, and then there's Rick's Torino Talladega. This is as close to a NASCAR-spec car as the state of California will allow someone to slap a tag on. And you better believe that Rick drives it on the streets of Orange County when he's in the mood.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration campaign number 22V675000 states that "Incorrectly tightened wheel lug nuts [of certain 2022 Ford F-150 Raptor 37s] can loosen and result in wheel separation from the vehicle, increasing the risk of a crash."

Of course, Ford is concerned about this ugly separation—that is, the possibility of an untimely parting of a 37-inch tire from the Raptor 37—and to remedy the situation, "Dealers will tighten or replace the wheel lug nuts, as necessary, free of charge." Of course, owners could look up the torque spec in their owner's manuals to ensure healthy unity between wheel and lug nut. Unconfirmed by Ford, we're sure the robot responsible for these loose lug nuts will get a good torqueing to for going, well, nuts.

It's not that the special 17-inch forged aluminum bead-lock-capable wheels or 37 x 12.5-inch R17 BFGoodrich tires themselves are problematic, but rather, the Raptor 37 may be prone to unexpectedly kicking them off due to loose lug nuts. Everyone hates loose (lug) nuts, but Ford and the 1,519 Raptor 37 owners affected probably dislike them wobbly nuts the most right now.

It's not unheard of for a hooptie or a wounded race truck to reject a wheel or two while in motion. But let's be real: Whether on- or off-road, it's not an ideal situation when your vehicle's wheels fall off. Cars, trucks, and SUVs thrive best with the proper number of wheels, and wayward rollers can become bouncing, careening projectiles when they refuse to submit to their rightful places within wheel wells. But consider it wheelie bad when a brand-new, factory-fresh vehicle suffers a wheel loss. The 2022 Ford F-150 Raptor 37, the third-gen F-series Raptor named so primarily because of its beefy 37-inch tires, is one such (potential) wheel chucker, and it has an NHTSA recall for the issue.

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