Nissan Pulsar GTI-R RNN14

Nissan Pulsar GTI-R (RNN14): the Baby Godzilla

Nissan did not build this thing to sell hot hatches. They built it to go rallying. To enter the World Rally Championship under Group A rules, the FIA made you produce a run of road cars first, a process called homologation, so Nissan crammed the good gear into a three-door Pulsar and sold it to the public from 1990 to 1994. The result is the RNN14: a plain little hatch with a turbo motor and drive to all four wheels, built for one reason and sold as a happy side effect. Roughly 14,600 rolled out the door over those four years, which sounds like plenty until you go hunting for a clean one today.

Under the bonnet sits the SR20DET, the same 2.0-litre turbo four you will find in a Silvia, here rated at around 230 PS (about 169 kW) from the factory. The exact number shifts a touch by market and source, so take it with a grain of salt, but call it a genuine 227 to 230 horsepower. That grunt goes to all four corners through ATTESA, the same all-wheel-drive family that made the R32 GT-R such a weapon. Bolt that into a shell weighing a smidge over a tonne and you have got a car that cracks 100 km/h in about 5.4 seconds. In 1991 money, that was properly quick.

The bonnet scoop is the whole story, and the warning

See that massive scoop on the bonnet? It feeds a top-mount intercooler that sits right on top of the engine. Tidy for packaging, brilliant for the look, but here is the catch every owner learns sooner or later: heat soak. Park an intercooler above a hot turbo motor, work it hard on a track or crawl through traffic on a warm day, and it drinks up engine heat instead of shedding it, so intake temps climb and power fades. The rally team fought this exact gremlin in period, and the works cars never actually won a WRC round, cooling troubles on long stages being part of the reason. Best result was a third at the 1992 Swedish Rally, where the cold air helped. None of that is a reason to walk away. It is simply the character of the car, something you manage rather than cure, and plenty of owners fit a front-mount intercooler and sort the cooling properly.

What to check before you hand over the cash

These are 30-plus-year-old homologation specials that mostly lived hard lives, so buy with your eyes open. The big one is cooling history. Ask about any overheating episodes or blown head gaskets, then get it up to full operating temperature and watch the gauge sit, because a cooked SR20 is an expensive way to learn a lesson. Next, look hard at what has been changed. Almost all of them have been fiddled with, and a neat front-mount intercooler conversion done properly is a genuine plus, while a boost-happy hack job on a tired stock bottom end should have you reaching for your keys. Then there is rust: check the sills, wheel arches, floorpans and strut towers, the usual JDM rot spots. And with so few built for some markets, only about 100 official right-hookers ever reached the UK for instance, make sure the paperwork stacks up and the chassis stamp actually reads RNN14.

Values have well and truly woken up. Depending on condition you are looking at anywhere from the low twenties to seventy-odd thousand US dollars, with honest, unmolested originals pulling the strongest money. The old "poor man's GT-R" tag is getting harder to justify with every passing year, and clean examples only get rarer from here.