Attention to detail is everywhere, showing that the factory really thought about the task it was sending the car to do

Looks like a model in our studio pictures, doesn’t it? This ex-works rally 240Z is millimetre-perfect, precisely as it was when the factory brought it to England to contest the wintry 1971 RAC Rally; a distillation of the best the factory could build. But 12 years ago it was pulled from a shed…

Owner Kevin Bristow has spent the past decade restoring the Datsun and, when the easiest option would have been to use lots of new parts, he’s kept the real thing – nearly all of it in a painstaking operation combining forensics and automotive microsurgery, to retain as much of the original car as possible. ‘There was enough of it left that I knew what I wanted,’ he says, at the end of an enlightening ten-year journey.

Between 1970 and ’72, Datsun’s racing department built teams of very special cars for international rallying and made its name with success on the tough East African Safaris. This is one of three machines built in September ’71 for the RAC in November, based on lightweight shells by the racing department, using lightweight pressings from the Z432R but featuring double-thickness chassis rails and outer sills, partly to support the external jacking points. Bonnet, doors and tailgate are in GRP, with Plexiglas windows, and plenty of other parts are unique to the year.

It was the only one of the three team cars to finish and after the rally was left in the UK and sold to A&B Motors in Manchester, to be used as a promo tool to sell more Zs. ‘The dealer paid the VAT and taxed it,’ says Bristow. ‘It was a perfect time to push the Safari win. The idea was that the car would arrive on a transporter with the right names on it, they would take people up the road and frighten the shit out of them, and then sell them a standard model.’

UK registered in 1972 when the carnet ran out, and in different hands from 1973, the 240Z did a handful of rallies with various owners until being put away in a shed in Bishop Auckland in about 1976. It stayed there until Kevin got wind of it and bought it in 1995.

‘I’ve begun to realise how special the 1971 cars were,’ says Bristow, a workshop owner and previous British Historic Stage Rally Champion in his other Z. ‘It’s the most interesting of the models, with the most differences from standard – plastic bonnet, hatch and doors, which they weren’t allowed to have the following year. I’ve learned so much over the past decade and met so many people – including Rauno Aaltonen. Z rally cars were built in batches of three to 10 at a time, from bodyshells made at the Hiratsuka Nissan Shatai body factory, and prepped at the Oppama works competition department, with some engines built at the Omori factory, now Nismo (Nissan Motorsport) HQ.’

These early shells are actually 432R Japanese-market units (the Z wasn’t being sold in the UK at the time) with a provision for a passenger footbrace and to move the seats forward – only for Japan. Under the dash is a big ‘R’, for the racing department. The roof and rear quarters are made out of thinner steel, with thicker chassis rails and sills, but there’s no seam welding.

The suspension struts are thicker, with the ride height increased by extending the tubes and rewelding the spring platforms 10mm higher, putting it at the same height as a Safari car. Monte cars ran lower, with a thinner sumpguard than this ‘rough road’ car’s massive 10mm-thick alloy item, which sits on its own subframe. The steering arms are shorter to quicken response. The 7x14 Kobe Seiko mags are unique to the rally cars, shod with tall Dunlop PW81s of the original type, size and pattern, ‘…found under a guy’s bench in Leeds’. The brakes are President-derived but with a wider caliper to fit over the vented disc, and the servo is a licence-built Bendix.

Attention to detail is everywhere, showing that the factory really thought about the task it was sending the car to do. The headlamps are modified to allow them to be removed from the front, rather than the long-winded process of getting them out from behind the cowls. On Monte cars, Perspex covers were fitted to avoid the sugarscoops filling with snow during ‘offs’ into snowbanks and depriving the crew of illumination. The front struts are further modified to take a cable drive from each front hub, one for each Halda to average out corners – wheelspin makes driving from the transmission pointless.

Twin wiring looms, the second one running essentials only, could be switched over in minutes in case of a failure. Inside, there’s a combined water-temp/oil-temp gauge, so there’s no oil-pressure gauge. Datsun was convinced of the strength of its engineering, and instead fitted an oil light where the handbrake light used to be, housed in the speedo.

Luckily many of these features remained in Kevin’s car, but some had to be painstakingly researched, tracked down or replicated. ‘I had the paint spectragraphed from the underside of one of the toolbox lids to get just the right colour,’ he explains, admitting that his painter took a bit of persuasion to leave the red unmopped to replicate the factory finish. ‘The exhaust megaphones are short versions of the racing manifolds, scaled up from pictures and from what I had left. The internal reinforcement is to stop them getting crushed if backed into a verge – and maybe also to retain Brillo pads long enough to pass noise tests. It was beautifully TIG-welded up with integral skids by Good Fabrications.’