GENERATION Z
LANCASTER INSURANCE
It’s often accepted that the Japanese car makers have taken their own direction in sports cars over the years, employing a high-tech, high-efficiency route to speed courtesy of high-revving multi-valve fours instead of the simpler powerplants in European and US cars.
Back in the day though, the young Nissan company knew that if it wanted to compete in the potentially lucrative US sports car market, a high-revving four-pot engine just wouldn’t do it, at least not in the ’60s when the V8 was still king. The firm had shown the world it was more than capable of engineering, designing and marketing a modern range of cars and the frontdrive Cherry together with a range of reliable and well-engineered saloons had already made the industry take the Japanese threat seriously.
To complete the line-up, Nissan needed a sports car though and in the mid-’60s started work on what was to become the S30, marketed as the Datsun Fairlady Z in its home market and the 240Z everywhere else.
Rather than sharing the platform of an existing saloon model, the 240Z was an all-new design with a swooping long-nose style. The engine was a six-cylinder design borrowed from the Japanese-market Laurel saloon and was a six-cylinder development of the Datsun 1600 four-cylinder. Ironically, this is thought to have been a copy of the six-cylinder Mercedes design and so adding the extra
