I used to want a tattoo back when they were, you know, cool. I appreciate the artistry behind them, but a lot of their appeal, the source of their unspoken cool factor, was that their very presence on your body implied you were a badass, and that implicit badness has been gentrified out of ink. Similarly, it used to be that having a loud, stiff, visually ostentatious car was seen as maladjusted deviant behaviour, before anyone could walk into a German car dealer and sign a lease on a little luxury sedan that ticks all those anti-social boxes so that they can feel tough in a safe, socially acceptable way. The 2025 Nissan Z Nismo skips that sanitization and feels like an authentic delinquent.
Just like a delinquent’s report card, things don’t look great for the Nismo-tuned Z on paper. For a price delta of fourteen grand over a Nissan Z Performance, you get… harder suspension, exhaust, brakes, wheels, a piddling 20 horsepower bump, and it doesn’t even have a manual gearbox? Blegh. For $75,998, it’s a tall ask for what seems like a misfire, but as has always been the case with the misunderstood miscreants, there’s more going on than meets the eye.
Let’s start with what literally meets the eye: a bodykit, red accents, and black wheels. The bodywork does serve a function of reducing drag and improving downforce at speed, and the red accents are just there to look tough, and draw your eye to the honking red Akebono calipers, clamping on upsized rotors without showboaty (read: useless) cross-drilling or slotting. Said big binders are proudly displayed behind forged 19-inch wheels made by Rays Engineering, and wrapped in extremely sticky Dunlop SP Sport Maxx GT600 rubber derived from the Nissan GT-R. Like a Yakuza’s telltale tattoos, which are still badass in their native land, the form projects the very literal function underneath.
Underneath, the 3.0-liter, twin-turbocharged V6 engine is tweaked –not just tuned- to produce 420 horsepower and 384 foot-pounds of torque, improvements of 20 and 34, respectively, over Zs that haven’t undergone the process of Nismosis. The intercooler and oil cooler are larger, and each bank has independent ignition timing control (also from the GT-R), all of which has allowed the turbo boost to be turned up. The gains on paper may be modest, but in reality, this engine feels manic – peak torque is available from just two thousand rpms and holds full song beyond five grand.
This engine is greatly aided by the decision to dump the manual gearbox in favour of a Mercedes-derived 9-speed auto, with bespoke hardware changes and calibration tweaks from Nismo. Other outlets have poo-pooed this gearbox in this application, and I have decried this gearbox’s lack of manners in some of AMG’s vehicles, but it’s a damn fine fit here. It makes the very most of the engine’s appetite for boost, and it’s always eager to play and enable your delinquent desires, even going as far as pinging off the rev limiter and snapping off dubiously hairy downshifts. It’s perfectly suited to the task of terrorizing tarmac in this beast.
Sidebar: As I write this, Nissan has announced they’re bringing the 6-speed manual to the Nismo Z, and I don’t think I’d want it. The shifter itself is actually quite nice, but the cursed rev hang is so bad as to sour the whole experience, and I cannot for the life of me imagine why Nissan feels it’s necessary. Even this car does it, but it’s less annoyingly obvious behind a torque converter.
Equally well suited to the task of manhandling motorways is the heavily modified chassis of the Nismo Z. Nothing is shared with the base Z; springs, shocks, sway bars, bushings, mounts are all beefed up here, as is the chassis bracing. Combined with the big brakes and sticky shoes, this is a serious chassis that feels very ready to party. It might be the stiffest stock car I’ve ever driven, and I loved it. It doesn’t feel like a factory car, it feels like it’s been built, modified to suit a very specific vision. It’s not hard for the sake of hard, it’s dialled.
Just as would be the case with driving someone else’s build, it needs a little time to make sense, for the intricacies of their decision making to start shining. It is, first and foremost, loud. It doesn’t crackle or do much in the way of the faux-theatrics, this is just what a pretty raw exhaust setup sounds like, and it sounds brutal, full throated and furious. It would almost sound exotic howling up to its 7,000 rpm redline if it weren’t so tuner-car nasty (in a good way).
Even in its normal drive mode, it feels eager, with its increasingly athletic modes only amping up shift behaviour. That said, it’s not exactly limp-wristed in its tame setting, it will more than happily throw the back end out with the traction control defeated. The Nismo suspension isn’t active or adaptive, it just is what it is, and it’s phenomenal. Turn-in is ferocious, mechanical grip is superfluous, mid-corner balance is absolutely gorgeous, and exits can easily be managed by the skinny pedal or the steering wheel; dealer’s choice.
On that note: this is one of the very few modern cars with genuinely good steering feel. Most modern cars, even ones we all really like, kinda suck on this front, and this Z is a bit of a revelation. Even the base Z is among the most organic-feeling cars on the market (… likely a result of being an ancient chassis from before that got lost in the pursuit of refinement), and the tweaks to this Nismo car only serve to make it sing all the more, and make the most of its inherent charms.
It is a very raw, and at times rough experience, but it’s not unusable as a car. The ride is hard, most might say too hard, but I’d counter that it’s not savage. It doesn’t crash and shudder with secondary vibrations like some luxury cars and their huge wheels do, and it’s fairly well insulated from road noise. It’s not a gutted race car, so it still has the niceties you’d expect from a modern car, like adaptive cruise control, good infotainment, and effective climate control, very much unlike a built tuner car. The only lightweighting comes in the form of manual Recaro seats, which are fabulous. If you can’t get comfy in these chairs, it’s on you.
I get to drive a lot of very fast, very fun cars in this line of work, but very few of them break through to me and actually make me want to drive them; some of you would be horrified to learn how rarely I use a car’s sport modes or try their launch control functions. It’s because I don’t really care, because they’re all the same. I’ve been there, done that, and beyond the core tenet of trying it once so I can say I did my job, I don’t give a damn about modern sport mode silliness, because it’s all fake. The Nismo Z is not fake.
This 2025 Nissan Z Nismo made me play with it. There was not a single occasion that I drove it without getting the tires to howl, without getting the rear end to yaw out in a beautiful powerslide, without pounding it off the rev limiter. We all have stories from when we were younger and dumber, and this Z made me that foolhardy delinquent all over again. It’s bad in the very best way.
