A country lane in Connecticut, late 1971. I'm sitting center row left in the family Microbus, horizontally opposing its way home from some venture or other.

    From behind comes a faint snarl, growing louder by the second. Then, in a blur, a sharklike shape flashes by my window. The blur resolves into a car, crossing back over the centerline, then disappearing around the next curve, leaves twittering in its wake.

    Do you remember your first Z-car?

    Well, this review may be your last reminder. In perhaps the most dramatic example of the conservatism sweeping the Japanese auto industry, Nissan has decided to end sale of the Z in the U.S., refocusing on its core market sedans. Which is sad. And which is surprising, given what performance - and in particular the Z - has meant to Datsun/Nissan in this country.

    The Z car was the pet project of Nissan's Johnny Appleseed in the United States, one Yutaka Katayama, known to all and sundry as Mr. K. He traveled the land recruiting dealers to sell a little known car -- then called Datsun -- from a country not then known for the quality of its cars.

    One way to impress upon Americans the merit of Datsun's cars was to race them. Sales of Datsun's breakthrough product in this country, the boxy but surprisingly sophisticated 510, were buoyed by Pete Brock's race successes in the red, white and blue number 46.

    The economy sedans sold here, though, were just a small part of Nissan's home-market lineup. So when it came time to build on those race successes and create a strong brand image, Mr. K. sent for the Fairlady Z. The rakish Z, designed by Albrecht Goertz, was Nissan's image leader in Japan. Called the 240Z here, it captured the imagination of every teenage boy in America almost overnight - and more than a few of their driving-age parents. It sat back on its wheels, the ultimate expression of the long-hood, short-deck GT school of design. A burly straight six propelled it with indefatigable force. And the Z's suspension seemed to have been designed on a different planet from those found on American muscle cars of the day.

    That performance showed through on the track, where 240Zs became a ride of choice in SCCA competition. Anyone who saw Bob Sharp's 240Z battle the Group 44 Triumphs of Bob Tullius recalls the races still today.

    Over the years, the Nissan Motor Company prospered. When the time came to consolidate their worldwide offerings under one name, Nissan chose the opposite path from Mazda; instead of renaming the company for its well-known product, they labored for years to make the public understand that Nissans and Datsuns were the same thing, and the confusion remains unresolved for some even today.

    Of course, the Nissan Z cars weren't really the same thing as their Datsun predecessors. Like many of their owners, the Zs grew over the years in both power and weight. The 260Z began the stretch; the 280Z and original 300ZX, although styled after the original 240, completed the transition from sports GT to overweight boulevardier.

    Then, a breakthrough.

    1990 brought a Z reborn. Lower, wider, completely redefined, the new Z - although still called 300ZX - was a muscular, uncompromised performance car. Yet it was civilized and elegant enough for even the toniest settings. It is that car, evolved into its ultimate twin-turbo form, to which we bid farewell today.

    At the same time, we say goodbye to the soul of a car company. Nissan without the 300ZX is Taxi without Reverend Jim, Lockheed without the Skunk Works, Foster Brooks sober. Alas, poor Nissan. We knew you well.

    It is low, it is wide, it is taut. On looks alone, you won't mistake the 300ZX for anything but a sportive machine. (You might on occasion mistake it for the Toyota Supra, but only because Toyota's stylists chose the Russian aerospace industry method of imitation instead of innovation.)
 

    Observers disagree over the most striking feature of the 300ZX's exterior. Some cite the broad, flat nose; others the muscular curves. But the car's clear signature is the window arch from Nissan's MID4 show car. The Splendid Co-Driver noted it too: "I like the arc, I like the curvature of the roof line. It has a very swoopy line to it... if you ask someone to draw a sports car, this is definitely what may come up."

    Nissan colors in that picture well. The arrest-me red paint of our test car looked liquid, as if the car were sealed in beautiful, completely smooth vinyl. It caught Her eye, too: "A very, very nice exterior finish. Lovely, smooth, very polished, just delightful, with that candy apple sort of look and you go, oh yeah, I want this, this is an exciting car."

    Indeed, I believe the SC-D was trying to make me jealous as she went on. "The back end is tidy although it is really pretty wide. The wing on the back is a tad gratuitous but what do you expect for a sports car. Same for the twin exhaust. But we've got lots of brake and that's darn nice and then the car with this kind of weight and power, God knows you need them." She noted the texturing of sill extensions to help shed dirt, and the huge glass area front and back.

    Inside, though, ergonomics are uneven. Due to its rake, the vast rear window offers a mail slot view at best. Even without the wing, you could scarcely see a thing; the wing seriously cuts down what's left. It's very hard to tell when someone's tucked right behind you, unless a) it's nighttime or b) their flashing blues are on, in which case you probably earned the ticket.

    The driver's rear quarter might as well be covered with metal because the quarter window does you no good. Looking back, you see the very thick interior plastic fitting on the B pillar and not the window recessed deeply into it. The T-roof is very nice, but a short greenhouse means that to fit in here, I must forego any hat worth the name; anybody over six feet would have a problem.

    On the other hand, the 300ZX's steering wheel is big and meaty and firm. You get a terrific handful of it. I love the feel of this wheel. Buttons are large and well labeled. Two rotary switches stick out from the instrument binnacle; headlights on the left, wipers with interval delay and wash and the automatic climate control on the right. The climate controls that take up about the size of a radio in a Ford are done with a very small screen and occupies about the size of a credit card in the Nissan. Driver and passenger air bags are standard.

    The all-black interior is done in a simply textured plastic on the upper door surfaces. The lower part surrounding your legs and thighs is a short pile velour or ultrasuede. It's a very soft and interesting thing to sit in, very much like being cuddled. (Supposition regarding the merits of spending $45,000 to replace the SC-D in this role is discouraged.) A fringe benefit: Even after sitting out on a sunny day, the seats don't feel hot.

    You sit very low in this car, so learn to identify highway patrolmen by their trouser stripes. Seats wrap around you well, with lumbar support adjusted by means of a lever on the side of the driver's seat.

    This is no Blazer when it comes to interior utility, but would you want it to be? The glove compartment is mindbogglingly small. (All right, we'll admit it, this is the least functional glove box we've ever seen. But it will hold a pair of gloves!) The passenger seat flips forward to reveal a hidden storage compartment, home to all of the manuals and such. Also back there is a mysterious velcro closure that opens to reveal some car structure. I have no idea what that's for. The rear hatch area features a cargo cover to keep prying eyes away from things they shouldn't see and, while shallow, transported a computer monitor refused entry by the more utilitarian Toyota Paseo.

    The center console hosts a shallow box with padded lid for your arm to rest on. It's not for holding much more than a tape recorder or maybe your shades. The tire pressure label's on the inside of the lid, easy to find. Ahead of that are switches for the mirrors and the suspension. Ahead of that the ashtray and lighter. Ahead of that the shifter, clock, then a hole for cassettes, CDs, or tape recorders and that's it for interior storage. Along, of course, with the aforementioned lousy glove box and seat-back map pockets.

    Climate controls, cruise control (with a no-brake lights cancel feature, yay), and other ancillary switches are arrayed in pods on each side of the instrument cluster -- very good. It looks a little busy, but you can operate all this stuff and keep your hands on the wheel, if you're not the SC-D. "The turn signal stalk is nicely positioned for persons with small hands. While my hands are not long enough to tune everything with my hands on the steering wheel, it is nice to have a lot of the climate controls and things like that very, very close to the wheel. I really appreciate that as a design feature instead of having to scramble around underneath the center column for climate controls."

    Big white on black gauges. Water temperature, revs, speed, fuel level, very large, and in this car that's probably a good idea. And inset into the tachometer is an oil pressure gauge, better than an oil temp gauge by my lights any day, and a boost gauge is set into the speedometer. Very tiny, easy to look at and remember. Orange needles on the black background.

    The top removes quite easily and stows in fitted bags in the trunk. You can go topless or, for shade, there are blackout panels in the trunk if you want them.

    A Bose radio is standard on the twin-turbo. In fact, lots of things are; your $45,483 includes the 300 horsepower twin turbo V-6, speed sensitive power steering, the HICAS 4-wheel steering system, 4-wheel power discs, 4-wheel multi-link suspension, the T-bar roof, fog lights, ABS, power driver seat, and the automatic temperature control. Start with the normally-aspirated version, though, and you can get a ZX for a lot less.
 

ON THE ROAD

    "Well, this is one of these cars you get into and you wear it. It's a very comfortable feeling wearing this car. It's a very sensual experience to drive this car and I'm enjoying it very much."

    Ah, but getting in is just foreplay. Underway, the 300ZX has a beautiful sweet spot where the turbo starts to come in at about 2000 revs and it just pulls and pulls and pulls from there. One can easily see why the SCCA matched turbocharged Eclipses against the normally aspirated 300ZXs. A turbo Eclipse would get nowhere near a turbo ZX.

    Acceleration is smooth, not peaky, but it is the closest thing to a rocket sled that we have driven since the Corvette Grand Sport. The back of the seat will acquire your body shape before the bottom does. Sixty miles an hour is reached in second gear, which means you've got three more gears of performance to go; acceleration from 50 to 80 is instantaneous.

    Because the 300ZX has more performance than you could possibly and responsibly use in an urban area, we headed for Skyline Drive, along the crest of Virginia's Appalachians.

    While Skyline Drive itself is a 35-mph road (which doesn't mean it's boring), US Route 522, going up the hill to Shenandoah National Park and the Drive at Thornton Gap is a brief but intense pleasure. The tight switchbacks on that particular stretch, lasting maybe a mile, let you have bunches and bunches of fun. It's one of those rare twisty roads, all growling gears and brake smell -- while going uphill. Then you get to go back down. And up. And...

    Lateral G -- sophisticated lateral G -- is what this car is all about. The smallest move of the steering wheel instantly translates into bolster pressure. I can't even say that the ZX takes a good set in corners because it never gets un-set. There's no body roll. None.

    Cornering is a new experience. Enter a corner on a steady arc, and increasing G-load on the outside wheels cues the HICAS system to adjust the rears. So the car starts moving around and you're not really expecting it. It improves the line, but the transition takes some getting used to. An acquired taste.

    Thanks to the steamroller-sized tires, this car feels even wider than it is. There's in fact so much contact patch that it's hard to tell if you're approaching the limit of adhesion, at least on smooth roads. The back end is willing to dance on lesser surfaces (as you've got so much power and in certain gears the torque comes in rather quickly), but you have to ask nicely. Those gargantuan Goodyear Gatorback ZRs -- 225-50x16 in front, 245-45x16 behind -- handle all common contingencies. Indeed, even on a wet and rainy day, with lots of power going into the rear wheels, the ZX remains quite tractable so long as you're conscious of what your right foot is about.

    The ZX's automatic suspension offers notably different sport and touring settings. Around town, the sport setting is a little too much even for my kidneys, and I like driving full-on race cars. The most significant difference between modes is in pitch oscillation. The touring mode is very useful when driving on concrete highways which in the sport mode have you constantly bobbing up and down. Not just when you hit the expansion joints, mind, but all the time your head is bobbing up and down like a rear-window doggie and the ZX's tail follows suit. Press 'touring' and you'd swear they repaved the road. The SC-D agrees: "The difference between touring and sport suspension is really quite clever and it certainly is obvious when you make the switch. Leaving aside the issue of whether or not I can figure out when one would want to do this, it certainly is very cool that you can."

    In driving on less-than-glassy-smooth roads, putting the Z in sport mode doesn't help your lap times. Because every bump is transmitted to the structure, the car judders during turn-in. It thus feels like it's not in as good contact with the pavement as in touring mode. So sport mode seems, in that instance, less sporty.

    "As shifters go, this is a pretty good one, and this is coming from someone who is a hard core Honda shifter fanatic. We've driven plenty more boring $45,000 cars than this," quoth she who found the driving surprisingly easy, given the amount of performance available. "A very nice treat. One can just glide the steering wheel around and it's very, very pleasant and easy to maneuver. There's lots of brake which is nice. You don't have to hunt around for it. It's there and immediate when I'm looking for it."

    Drive past a big parking lot at quitting time and every male 25 to 50 looks at this car and suddenly remembers to play the lottery.

    The tiny headlights under the large covers are very pale white and very bright. Good halogens with a wide pattern.

    The car does make a variety of unexpected and unexplained noises. The radio antenna runs up and down with the sound TV shows use for a submerging submarine. At idle the quad pipes in the back make a curious burbling sound, almost as if they too were full of water. Sometimes, when stopping, there's a little whizzing sound from the rear of the car. The ZX obviously speaks to us in some language we've neglected to study.

    Like that collection of unidentifiable but not unpleasant noises, most of the glitches we found in the 300ZX were petty. The turn signals didn't like to cancel (big whoop). The display that indicates where you're putting the air (if you choose not to use the automatic climate control) is hard to read in direct sunlight and, of course, with the glass T-roof, there's a lot of direct sunlight. Large white placards on both sun visors declare the importance of air bags; their size and color make them quite distracting in daytime driving, and even more distracting at night because they're light in color when everything else is dark. Out of character for what is supposed to be a burly, macho, muscle car, the 300ZX has one of those little tinny economy car horns that goes eek! Picture Stallone with the voice of Montgomery Burns and you get the idea.

    Also, the HICAS system occasionally believed itself to be malfunctioning. After a while the light went off, and we resumed steering.

    With the top removed and the windows down, at 55 there's some buffeting in the cabin, but you were expecting maybe what? And it got 22.5 in mixed driving, bang on the EPA rating of 18 around town and 24 on the highway.

    One can quibble with the price point on this car, although you can have quite a good 300ZX for much less money. The twin turbo version probably isn't really necessary, but what great art is?

    Which is the point. Nobody needs a 300ZX twin turbo, just as nobody needs Pol Roger, Sunday on the Island of Grand Jatte, or a Lear 35. But we'd all lose something if they didn't exist.

    Help save an endangered species. Buy a Z-car.

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