The Nissan Fairlady Z 432 sits alongside other Japanese icons like the Toyota 2000GT and the original Nissan Skyline GT-R as seriously collectible and rapidly appreciating motor cars. The emergence of vintage Japanese machines onto the global market has been a long time coming, but the past two years have seen some of the rarer Japanese iron starting to fetch 6 and 7 figure sums.
To the unfamiliar eye, the Fairlady Z 432 looks like a standard Datsun 240Z, though from a performance perspective, the Z 432 is in a league of its own. Its speed was due to the Nissan Skyline GT-R S20 engine that the engineers had shoehorned under the bonnet. The engine was a technical tour de force with double overhead camshafts, 4 valves per cylinder, 3 Mikuni carburettors, 6 cylinders and 1989cc capacity.
This 2 litre powerhouse is one of the greatest engines produced in Japan at the time, in fact it’s probably one of the finest 2 litre engines ever made by anyone.
With a kerb weight of 1040 kilograms and a rear wheel horsepower output of 160, the Nissan Fairlady Z 432 had serious performance chops by anyone’s standards in the late 1960s and early ’70s.
Due to the cost of the car Nissan only built 420 of them, with a few examples being delivered to various Japanese police departments to ensure they couldn’t be outrun by the new generation of sports cars being made in the country.
The Z432 you see here is the only one I’ve ever seen fitted with the rare factory roll-cage option , it also has the highly sought after magnesium wheels and factory rear spoiler. Perhaps the great benefit of owning this model over one of the other vintage Japanese sports cars is the ease of finding spare parts – much of the body, suspension, electrical systems and ancillaries are the same as the Datsun 240Z. This means that sourcing parts is relatively easy, and no where near as expensive as it would be with something like a Toyota 2000GT.
This car will be passing over the auction block with Keno Brothers in New York on the 19th of November this year, they have the value estimated as between $125,000 and $250,000 USD – although a comparably car sold with RM Sotheby’s earlier this year for $230,000, and the market certainly hasn’t stopped accelerating since then.
Click here to visit Keno Brothers to read more or register to bid.
Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
