HS30-H

It is nicknamed the 'PZR' rear spoiler because that design was first seen on the PS30-SB model Fairlady Z432-R, for which the factory shorthand code was 'PZR'. Originals were made from woven fibreglass cloth roving rather than chopped strand (most of the later copies were chopped strand) and there were 6 mounting points: Two inboard (accessed through the drain tube holes in the tailgate) and four outboard (holes drilled through the skin of the tailgate at either end, as in your photo). Underside of the spoiler was 'open', and the mounting brackets were simple steel tabs with captive studs, moulded/glued into the spoiler body. The very ends of the spoiler originally had rubber seals glued on, and theoretically they sealed against the body where the ends of the spoiler overlapped the tailgate. In practice they often got knocked off before long... Here's an original:

I think that's a "call me to discuss" price, for something that's got such a mixture of 'early' vs 'late' details that you'd wonder whether it was Dr Frankenstein's personal transport... Big old can o' worms there.

That's the windscreen washer bottle mount. Location is under the inspection flap on the opposite side to the battery.

To settle the *local* argument, you'd want to see 'Flamingo' mentioned in an official period Australian market brochure. Nissan Japan occasionally changed colour names for local markets, but I've never seen the word 'Flamingo' used in official Nissan documentation in connection with the S30-series Z. It is far more likely to have been used by a local paint manufacturer/supplier, and this seems to have happened more often when they thought the colour corresponded closely with something they already supplied.

This is good advice. Here in the UK we've seen quite a few of the recently imported lower-end-of-the-market USA cars turning out to have dodgy repairs to historic crash damage, and even cut-and-shuts and switched identities. Not good. Be careful!

I preferred it before they 'restored' it a few years ago. I don't think it needed it. They're only original once...

Possibly set that high to deter Goo.net buyers whilst 'getting it out there' that the can o' worms is available for a quieter person-to-person sale to someone who has all the necessary mechanical parts to put together a PS30-spec car, but needs an identity to pin on it. There are more parts floating around than genuine cars, so the chicken-and-egg problem gets solved by the raising from the dead of previously expired identities. This is what you need to watch out for if you are in the market for one of the rarer models, and in particular the S20-engined cars. You want to see continuous history, without big - unexplained - gaps. It can be tricky. Caution: Resurrectionists at work!

I would say it seems to be a late 1973 and up (probably '74) originally L20-engined car with some earlier parts additions, and the identity from another car pinned on it.

In the antiques trade that is an example of what is - being polite - called "a marriage"...

That's classic water-attack damage, and very difficult - if not impossible - to repair safely. Bad news I know, but best to be honest about it.

Just to add, of all the 'Violet Mags' I've seen, very few of them have any cast-in logos or data. You *might* find a date stamp (usually year and month) which was added to them to indicate the start of their safe life in Works use. Some of the other wheels made by Kobe Seiko for Nissan have markings on them, notably the Nissan 'hamburger' mark on the circuit racing wheels and some extra coding on the front face of the OEM 432 wheels, but the Violets not so much. I might pull a Violet mag out of storage and weigh it, for comparison with yours, but yours look like The Real Thing to me.

First thing to say is that this particular type of Magnesium (it is very similar to Elektron) is not really all that volatile. Some people talk about Magnesium wheels as though they are Nitro Glycerine, but the Elektron formula is not pure Mg and is quite robust. It won't spontaneously combust if you just look at it a bit funny... However, you really don't want to abuse them and if you take them back to bare metal they will need some protective coating. The best is Alodising (distinct from Anodising), often spelled 'Alodizing', which is common in the aviation field. They can be painted over the top of that. Stripping depends somewhat on what type of paint/coating they have on them. You don't want to be too harsh (the material is quite soft) so you could experiment with hand stripping, using a heat gun and hardwood tools. You can use a proprietary paint stripper, but do it in sections and don't leave it on too long. I've had some success with both soda blasting and with the gentler types of media blasting (I believe one place I used blasted them with walnut shells) but you really do need to be careful to use minimal pressure. As long as they are stored in the dry they should be fine. If exposed to high humidity and/or too much acid/alkali they can become very porous and that's dangerous. Watch out for trapped moisture when they have tyres on. I've seen them rot from the inside. If in good nick they are very, very strong (that's why Nissan used them) and they are beefy castings - unlike circuit racing wheels - but they do need that little bit of extra care. Crack testing/X-Ray is a good idea if you want to be 100% sure, and can run to the cost. Hope that helps.

I'm not taking responsibility for it, LOL. Nicknames are nicknames. They don't necessarily add up. Kobe Seiko's Nissan works circuit race 4-spokes with the external bead locks have long been known as 'Gotti Mags' in Japan, despite having nothing at all to do with Gotti. Once it gets into common use it might as well be set in stone. This also is not a 'Violet':

They are Kobe Seiko Nissan works rally wheels, made from Elektron Magnesium, most commonly known as the 'Violet' mags. They are a very similar casting to the Kobe Seiko-manufactured wheels that Nissan commissioned for the 432, but slightly different (including no raised centre for an emblem, and tapered bolt fixing rather than the parallel sleeve nut style of the OEM 432). The 'Violet' nickname comes from the fact that they were often seen on Nissan's 4-cylinder works rally cars of the same name.

No no no. That one has 'had a life' shall we say, but nothing too bad. The one I'm talking about is PS30-00105. Here it is on display at ZCon a few weeks ago:

And that's not even the worst of it. The more the car was taken apart, the more it revealed. And this was what was being described as "immaculate" by the importer. Much of it was rectified and/or mitigated, but it's still half made out of other cars. Apparently it won a prize at ZCON in the USA a couple of weeks ago....

Thing is, I can understand the relative rarity of nice R34 GT-Rs helping to drive prices up (with what, something like 12,000 or less built and very few having escaped radical modification and abuse?) along with it perhaps being seen as one of the *the* Skyline GT-R high points, but these BaT guys are bidding against each other on cars that seem to keep popping out of the woodwork almost every week. There must be a finite supply of 'early' HLS30Us, but there certainly seem to be plenty of them coming to the BaT auctions and a lot of them appear to be being sold by dealers and flippers. There must be quite a few such cars that are being sold off in probate sales or by owners who are just too old to use them anymore, and *that* is where you want to be buying. Taking pride in paying the most for something amongst fellow collectors seems to be more about ego than true love and appreciation for the cars. And anyway, I think the whole BaT thing is weird. Who wants to be bidding in an auction where anonymous comments are encouraged, but often vetted or edited by admin while the auction is live? It opens the whole format up for abuse and/or manipulation. All rather odd.

Probably will, but I have to say that this BaT phenomenon of high-selling S30s (and it is almost exclusively HLS30Us) seems to be fuelled by a small coterie of self-styled 'Collectors' who are trying to out-Billy-Big-Balls each other. The same few characters seem to be active on almost every auction of similar cars, and when they've rinised the arse out of that particular scene they will probably move onto the next 'up and coming' marque and model. The guy who bumped the bids up by 85k USD in one shot is the same guy who bought the 918 Orange 432 that was recently put back together and sold here in the UK, and which - when it was imported from Japan in a case of the blind leading the blind - was made out of large sections of RLS30 stuck together with expanding foam. Back half of the car is about four years younger than the LH front of the car, and three years younger than the RH front. But apparently the new owner is a "renowned collector and marque expert". LOL. Which is an object lesson on what happens when markets get a little overheated, people who don't know what they are looking at get advised by people who don't know what they are looking at, and the whole shebang is egged on by people who don't even care. These are the same people who shout "Get in the hole!" at professional golf tournaments.

Phew!

I should imagine they picked off most of the contents of Noah's Ark... Don't know about goats, but looking down inside the driver's door panel once - I was looking at the winder mechanism, which is modified from stock - I spotted an Ostrich feather sitting down there at the bottom. Apparently they had hit a few of these daft creatures on the route. Collateral damage I guess.

The car was 'refurbished' in 2013. Apparently this was required because Nissan wanted to continue using the car for display purposes at various events, and to have it both running and driving, whilst not falling foul of the dreaded Health And Safety and public liability insurance issues. Meh. So a volunteer team spent some time on it and made it 'safer' for display, and this included re-covering the seats (unwitting vandalism in my opinion) so a certain amount of baby was chucked out with the bath water... Mind you, when the car finished the rally in '71 it was quite beaten up and needed some help to hold it all together before final scrutineering. And having finished the event it was whisked back to Japan for display at Nissan's Ginza, Tokyo head office and a tour of local dealerships. At one point it was sitting on a plinth at Yurakucho, Tokyo train station! At the end of the year it was displayed at the 1971 Tokyo Motor Show. During all this the car got messed around with a little to spruce it up for display (apparently some dimwit members of the general public couldn't understand why it was so beaten up...), and a few 'souvenirs' were taken. When I first saw it in the metal back in the early 1990s it was still very original but a few bits and pieces had gone missing off it. Some of it was in storage with Safari Motors (the Nissan-owned company which curates the Heritage Collection) so was safe. Many of those parts are now back on it. Here's how it was in 2013. I liked it this way the most:

I think it qualifies as a ripple:

OK, I know I go on like a broken record about stuff like this, but I really want people to get some idea as to just how special the Works cars were. There was almost nothing stock about them. Almost every part or assembly was modified or special in some way. Here's an example that kind of hides in plain sight. The Works team sometimes needed to replace headlamps (missing lights and even mud flaps could lead them to lose points and/or be disqualified from an event) and - as some of us know - this can be a pain in the arse. Especially so when the inner arch is filled with mud or snow, and another mechanic is inside the wheelarch servicing the brakes or replacing a suspension leg. The solution was to modify the headlamp pods/'sugar scoops' so that the lamp unit could be removed, replaced and adjusted from the outside of the car. Most of the Works cars had FRP/ABS moulded lamp pods, and were cut away to suit. They even added a finger tab to the housing so that the unit could be held in place whilst the screws were removed or attached. Seriously, this could be the difference between winning and losing a rally. In the '71 East African Safari Rally-winning car's case, this became slightly academic when the crew were forced to use bailing wire to improvise a rules-compliant right hand head lamp after they had knocked the whole thing off. But still... Here's the LH pod on the car in question: That 'tribute' car on Bring A Trailer - to my eyes anyway - seems to be just a paint and stickers job because it doesn't pay any attention to the 'feel' or content of the original. It leads people to think that the original Works cars were almost stock, when they were nothing of the sort.

Nissan has three cars in its Heritage Collection at Zama: The '71 East African Safari Rally-winning car, the '72 Monte Carlo Rallye 3rd place finisher and the '73 Safari-winner. They regularly show the '71 and '72 cars at events all over Japan. The '73 Safari car requires some conservation work, and I do hope they don't mess it up. In my opinion they over-'restored' the other two cars and chucked some of the baby out with the bath water. I'm told there were the dreaded Health and Safety liabilities involved in showing the cars in their previous (much more original) state, and I guess that's the world we live in now. My friends Kevin Bristow and Gary Hicks own two genuine ex-Works cars here in the UK: Kevin's is the '71 RAC Rally car of Herrmann and Schuller and Gary's is the '73 RAC Rally car of Kallstrom and Billstam, complete with its LY24 'Crossflow' engine. Race car 'Big Sam' has used more than one ex-Works bodyshell in its life, and is currently built on a bodyshell that was used on the '73 Monte Carlo Rallye (not an ex-Safari car, as is often said). However, it was converted from LHD to RHD and almost nothing of its rally-related spec is left. There's a '71 Monte Carlo Rallye car which now resides in the USA, and which requires a sympathetic restoration. This car resided in private ownership - converted to a road car! - for many years in Holland, and I was involved in its authentication and sale. This car is very special as - like Kevin's '71 RAC car - it used the 'PZR' 432-R's lightweight bodyshell componentry for its build. They are quite different from the cars built for the rule changes of the '72 season and beyond. I've got a collection of genuine ex-Works parts in my posession, and rather than have them sitting on shelves and hanging on the wall like hunting trophies I want to put them on a suitable car to give them some kind of living purpose. I have a complete engine, transmission, diff, radiator, oil cooler, suspension, sumpguard mount/brace, brakes, wheels, seats, roll bar, switchgear and lots of other bits and pieces, and can fabricate stuff like pedals, tank, plexi windows and all the other bits to give it the right feel. Rather than replicating a well-known Works car, I'm aiming to replicate/tip my hat to one of the early Works test cars which was 918 Orange (it was built on a PZR 'shell) and I have an early 1970 LHD on which to base it. It's been delayed by the Covid-19 lockdown, but I hope to get it into the paint shop near Christmas and put it together next year. Watch this space. Here's Kevin's '71 RAC car ('TKS 33 SA 3640') on a demo event at Chatsworth House (one of the original RAC Rally stages) and that's me in the 'Navigator' seat, trying not to bash my head on the roof. Kevin is currently recovering from a very serious motorcycling accident and I really miss him and need him back in his car...