Until recently, there was just one street-legal Nissan R390 GT1 in the world. Nissan built it as a prototype for its 24 Hours of Le Mans challengers that contested the race in 1997 and 1998. The car wasn’t particularly successful in its first attempt, and one of the four chassis entered into the ’98 running notched a respectable third-place finish, but that’s pretty much all history wrote on the R390. This is an endurance racer that’s been mostly lost to time, but thankfully, we get to talk about it today, because another road-registered car has emerged wearing an unexpected livery.
The R390 seen here did compete in Le Mans in ’98, as car No. 31. And not only did it participate, but its owner today is none other than Érik Comas, one of the three men who steered it to fifth overall in that event. Many years later, this very R390 was converted to road duty. Today, it’s said to retain about 95% of the same parts it had during competition, as well as a glass windshield and cooling system, among other “luxuries,” to achieve street legality. Comas trotted it out this week in the colors of another Nissan race car he made history in.
Nissan never ran the R390 with a Pennzoil livery, but if you know your late-’90s Japanese race cars, you probably already understand what’s going on here. The yellow-and-black getup recalls the NISMO GT-R GT500 that Comas also drove in the 1999 Japanese Grand Touring Car Championship; he and Satoshi Motoyama were the class winners that season. Before any preservationists get up in arms, let it be known that this is only a wrap, and this R390 is stark white underneath. (Which, incidentally, is a fine look for this or any other ’90s Le Mans machine.)
Artist Benoit Fraylon, BillionaireWrap, and Pitstop Monte Carlo all collaborated to bring the design to life, and it was unveiled at Box98 Monaco on May 8, which, as far as I can tell, is like a Dave & Busters except with indoor karting instead of giant Angry Birds arcade machines. The result looks fantastic, like one of those “What If” renders we’re inundated with online all the time nowadays, but have stopped paying attention to because they never amount to anything. It’s one thing to race against somebody who’s put this livery on their R390 in Forza; it’s quite another to know that one of the only surviving examples of the real deal is sporting these colors right now.
If you’re curious as to the whereabouts of some other R390s, Nissan maintains the one true road car, seen above, in its Zama museum in Japan. The automaker also keeps some racing chassis too; the No. 23 short-tail from 1997 can be seen peeking into the frame up there, and, naturally, the podium-sitting No. 32 car from ’98 is likely never to leave the company’s stable. Meanwhile, No. 30 was a part of Xavier Micheron’s Ascott Collection as recently as five years ago.
All this is to say that when an R390 appears in public, we ought to take notice. It’s not an ordinary thing, and, like many of its endurance-racing contemporaries, the R390 was not an ordinary car.
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