The R34 was a weapon in its day, and didnt it like to show off about it? 20 inch wheels, aggressive looking front bumper and air dam, spoiler, air vents, bulging wings, big exhaust tips, a veritable greatest hits from the RippSpeed catalogue.
3 decades on Mrs D's family hatch is rather faster than a stock R34 (albeit artificially restricted to 112mph), more powerful (448 horses), gruntier (670NM), has computer controlled 4wd with torque vectoring etc, track-street-snow-off road driving modes, yet not a spoiler, vent or speed stripe in sight. You wouldn't take any notice if you walked past it in the street. It barely registers in my consciousness.
What was astonishing in the nineties barely counts as humdrum in this fast paced technical age.
Having said that, it has little soul. Im passionate about my whiteblock turbo'd T5 but the P8 is just a bit meh . Id argue the R34 was also too computerised for its own good and also was more white goods than a passion piece, but thats the price you had to pay in the 90s for giving Ferrari's a fright with only a middle management budget.
So yeah, things have moved on immeasurably but we've also lost something along the way. There was a point in the 90s where the electron started to tame the machine, only flash stuff at first but by the late 00's pretty much everything had succumbed. I liked the old days when pressing the throttle pulled a cable that moved a piece of metal in a carb or a TB, none of the dead feel of putting your foot on a pedal connected to a potentiometer and the various computers then taking a vote on whether to let you do what youre asking of them. Yes, performance boggles the mind, but its bland. I want my cars to have the character of a mercenary on crack, and not that of a quantity surveyor enjoying a spam sandwich packed lunch.
