Media | Articles
The Nissan MID4 II Could Have Been Japan’s First Supercar
Remember the final scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the Ark of the Covenant is boxed up and tucked away into a vast warehouse of unknown and mysterious treasures? Well, if you’re a Nissan fan, such a place actually exists. It’s called the Zama museum or, more properly, the Nissan Heritage Collection, and you can find it tucked away in Nissan’s engine manufacturing plant on the outskirts of Yokohama. It’s not like a normal museum, in that you must request permission to enter beforehand, but you can get in for free and it is absolutely crammed with fantastic cars.
There are racing machines, Skyline GT-Rs that battled at Le Mans and the Safari Rally Fairlady 240Zs. There are perfectly preserved Austins built under license from the earliest days, mighty Japanese Grand Prix racers (one of them with a Chevy V-8 for a heartbeat), and even the weirdo open baseball cars used in Japan to transport pitchers to the mound. There aren’t always placards, so it’s all a bit overwhelming, so you might find yourself puzzling over something that looks a little like a silver Acura NSX plonked right in the middle.
But it’s not an NSX. It is, in fact, one of the greatest what-might-have-been stories to ever come out of Japan’s bubble economy engineering moonshot days: The Nissan MID4 II. You can keep your VTEC—this silver bullet has a mid-mounted, twin-turbocharged 3.0-liter V-6 good for just shy of 330 hp, and all-wheel-drive to get that power to the ground. It has double-wishbone suspension up front, multilink at the rear, and even rear-wheel-steering for enhanced agility.
First shown at the 1987 Tokyo Motor Show, the MID4 II predates both the R32 Skyline GT-R and the 300ZX twin-turbo. It begs the question, “What if Nissan had tried to actually build this thing?” Instead of Honda grabbing the world’s attention in 1989 in Chicago, it might have been Nissan that flexed the full engineering might of the Japanese auto industry during its golden era.
Marketplace
Buy and sell classics with confidence
Instead, the MID4 II remains an evolutionary dead-end, though it did pass down parts of its DNA to both the 300ZX TT and the GT-R. But it’s not just a footnote: Not only did Nissan really intend this car for production, but its development is a critical link in the story of two of the company’s fiercest performance cars. It’s the Ark in which Nissan’s engineers placed their best R&D, and when it opened, stuff came out that could just about melt your face off.
Father of the Skyline
To properly place the MID4 II and its MID4 predecessor in Nissan’s constellation of cars, we must first have an introduction to the man in charge of the project. His name was Shin’ichiro Sakurai, but everyone tended to call him Mr. Skyline, or Skyline no Chichi, “Father of the Skyline.”
Sakurai was a Prince Motor Company man, hired on there fifteen years before Nissan would swallow it up. Born in 1929 near Yokohama, he graduated into the job market in a rebuilding postwar Japan, and at first worked in construction. When he started at Prince, he was one of just ten engineers there, a young man essentially thrown into the deep end of building cars.
In 1962, Sakurai traveled to Europe, where he saw Jim Clark best Graham Hill to take the top step of the podium at the Belgian Grand Prix, the first F1 victory for the Scotsman. Invigorated by the atmosphere of racing, he returned to Japan to find himself charged with building a Prince racecar for the upcoming Japanese Grand Prix. He did so using one of the oldest tricks in the book.
Realizing Prince’s mid-size sedan, the Skyline, lacked sufficient power for the circuit, Sakurai extended its nose and shoehorned in the 2.0-liter inline six from the larger Prince Gloria sedan to create the Skyline GT. The proportions were a little off, but at the 1964 Japanese Grand Prix (only in its second running), Tetsu Ikuzawa managed to muscle his number 41 Skyline GT past the privateer Porsche 904 GTS that was in the lead. The Skylines wouldn’t beat the Porsche in the end, but Sakurai’s creation and Ikuzawa’s skill had proven that Japanese cars had a shot at beating the world’s best. In a nicely pleasing footnote, Ikuzawa would later become Porsche’s only Japanese factory driver.
Sakurai’s long attachment with the Skyline stretched into the early 1980s, along with the development of many specialized racing machines. One potential ancestor of the MID4 is the R380, a mid-engined prototype racer engineered by Sakurai, which won the very next Japanese Grand Prix. Along with the road cars, Sakurai would carefully shepherd along the evolution of these racing machines until the golden age of the Japanese Grand Prix ended.
The Lotus Eater
Given his experience with mid-engined prototypes and his stature within Nissan, it’s little surprise that Sakurai was tasked in 1984 with heading up the team that would build a car that could take on Europe’s best. As was the case with Honda’s NSX, Nissan was confident that it could create a mid-engined car that could rival a Ferrari 308, or a Lotus Esprit. After all, even the wedgy Esprit Turbo wasn’t making much more than 200 hp, and Nissan had an all-new V-6 that could outpunch it.
It was an evolution of the VG series of V-6s, the still-fresh replacement for the venerable L-series inline-sixes. Displacing 3.0 liters and featuring double overhead cams and four valves per cylinder, it made just shy of 245 hp in the original MID4 shown at the 1985 Frankfurt auto show.
If there was any doubt about how serious Nissan was at its attempt to build a mid-engined performance car, then showing up in Germany with a running and driving prototype—in left-hand-drive no less—should have indicated that the MID4 was no science project.
Two show cars were built, a white one for Germany, and a red right-hand-drive model for the Tokyo Motor Show held one month later. This first generation of MID4 didn’t feature turbocharging, but offered plenty of technology besides the mid-mounted transverse V-6. It featured the first application of Nissan’s HICAS (High Capacity Actively Controlled Steering), a passive rear-wheel steering system that would eventually make it into production cars like the GT-R and 240SX.
The all-wheel-drive system was also unusual, sending two-thirds of the power to the rear axle and the other third up front. At the time, Audi’s Ur-Quattro had shown that all-wheel-drive was a genuine performance tool no longer just for offroad use, and Porsche was about to prove the point by blowing the exotics out of the water with the 959. Nissan would eventually get its hands on an example of the latter by some slight subterfuge, picking it apart to learn its secrets. Meantime, the MID4’s AWD pointed the way forward for the tenacious grip that would be a hallmark of the R32 GT-R.
A Heart of Boost
While the first MID4 appeared production-ready, Nissan hesitated to give the go-ahead. In retrospect, perhaps caution was the right move. Memorably, when Honda’s engineers first presented a prototype of the NSX to Ayrton Senna, who was in Japan for shakedown tests on his Honda-engined McLaren, they received a shock. Senna basically told them the car was underbaked, and significant revisions followed.
Technology was changing fast, and the Z32 300ZX was already in the pipeline. Thanks to the leadership of company president Yutaka Kume, Nissan as a company wasn’t focused on building some kind of super-MR2 for the 1980s, but rather on being the most advanced automotive manufacturer possible by the year 1990. The effort was called Project 901, for “Number One in 1990.”
For the 1987 Tokyo Motor Show, Nissan showed off the thoroughly reworked MID4 II concept. Now, the V-6 engine was mounted longitudinally, and fitted with twin turbochargers. Power was up to 325 hp, and once again the concept was built in left-hand drive.
Production would never happen. Instead, the twin-turbo V-6 would find a home in the 300ZX as that model broke with tradition from previous S30-chassis Zs and ZXs. Nissan wouldn’t build a mid-engined car again until the 1990s, when it produced the V-8-powered GT1 road car to fulfill Le Mans homologation rules.
Not bound for the road, the MID4 II might have been tucked away in some forgotten corner, as is so often the case with concept cars. But before Indiana Jones can protest, “That belongs in a museum,” fortunately for us, it is. We can at least say that anyone interested in having a good look at Nissan’s mid-engined dreaming can do so. If you’re ever near Yokohama, go check out the collection. You won’t be disappointed.
I remember this car. It was an engineering marvel.
But it lacked soul The design was very plain and it just did not stand out globally.
This could have been an interesting car. The MID4 II does have the same NSX style in a way. What could have been. Imagine if the NSX had this as competition at the time.
That’s great looking car, certainly what anyone would imagine if trying to envision a “Nissan supercar”. And I mean that in a good way.
Kinda looks like a Pulsar NX and a 240 SX had some hot S*X.