part 9 | The Phantom Sportscar
- Luca Sciarrillo
- Dec 6, 2020
- 7 min read
Updated: Jun 3
The most complete story behind the groundbreaking old school sportscar that never got its chance.
The power was only part of the story. Underneath, the ZZ’s hybrid chassis — an aluminium tub welded from square-section extrusions with steel subframes — had been reworked. Still built in the UK, still relying on that same square-section alloy skeleton, but now with rounded sidewalls to better house its occupants without resorting to yaw the seats inwards, maintaining the side protection of its high sills.
The frame itself was stretched, particularly at the rear, to accommodate the new straight-six — mounted longitudinally and spun 180 degrees — differently to the transverse SR20 it replaced. This added 275mm to the wheelbase and a whole new level of seriousness to the car’s intent.
At the front, the subframe was re-engineered to meet production car crash standards — a concession to real-world usability, rather than track-only indulgence.
Cooling, too, was comprehensively overhauled. A front-mounted radiator, tilted back at around 60 degrees, pulled in air through a wide nose grille, while secondary vents behind the side windows — just like the F40’s — directed airflow straight into the engine compartment. Three distinct ducts feeded air to the horizontally mounted intercooler in a spectacular way: two raised channels started at the top of the windscreen, before gradually narrowing in section to speed up airflow. Between them, by subtraction of volume, a massive centre intake shaped like a NACA duct, pulls the air in the scoop right at the end of the tiny rear window, through which the engine can be seen.
The result? The ZZII could use the entire roof width to gulp in air, without the aerodynamic drag of a full-width airscope. Functionally clever, visually dramatic, and exactly the sort of out of the box design you’d expect from a team with something to prove.
At the core of the ZZII sat the same engine that powered the Tommykaira R-Z — the RB26DETT. Still twin-turbocharged, but now enlarged to 2.7 litres with an 87mm bore and a 75.7mm stroke. Internally, it was a catalogue of motorsport-grade components: forged aluminium pistons with titanium-coated rings, new inverted H-section con rods, a balanced crankshaft made in the UK, racing ignition, polished valve seats, metal head gasket, revised cam profiles with higher lift and duration, strengthened valve springs, an upgraded ECU, and improved cooling courtesy of a bigger intercooler and a Skyline N1 water pump.
Boost came from a new Garrett turbo, with fuelling managed by uprated injectors and a higher-flow pump. Exhaust gases exited via a 3.5-inch system, ending in a Fujitsubo rear section with Tommykaira tips.
The result: 550PS at 7500rpm and around 540Nm at 6000rpm. It didn't spin past 8000, because according to Kaira, peak power arrived earlier — regardless of what the Gran Turismo speedometer might claim. The 9000rpm limit, if it ever existed, likely belonged to an earlier concept destined for RWD and 600bhp, as seen in GT2. Despite this, since being equipped with the same Farndon crankshaft of the R-Z, a more aggressive setup could still take advantage of two-thousands RPM extra.
Unlike in the BNR34, here the RB26 wasn’t perched above the front axle. Mounted further back and rotated 180 degrees, it required a new sump design — no longer having to accommodate a side-mounted diff with a driveshaft piercing the oil pan.
The gearbox was a six-speed Getrag V160 taken straight from the GT-R, along with the ATTESA E-TS Pro all-wheel-drive system, with a rear differentials both fitted to the front and rear axle, and a custom transfer case to be designed to account for the different tyre diameters — and rotational speeds. Due to time and budget constraints, the front driveshaft were not installed on the prototype, leaving it RWD only, and with a mirrored gear pattern that meant 1st down left and 2nd straight up.
The suspension design was essentially race ready. Up front, double wishbones operated by pushrods and horizontally mounted coils — Bilsteins, custom-valved by Tommykaira — all tucked neatly beneath the bonnet. Like the McLaren F1, the shocks could be accessed by lifting the small body panel. At the rear, the layout was derived from the original ZZ's double wishbone, albeit reworked for the longer wheelbase and added power.
The wheels were forged magnesium Tommykaira Pro-Rs, steered via an unassisted conventional rack-and-pinion. Tyres measured 245/40 ZR18 at the front and 285/30 ZR19 at the rear, though the prototype runs on slightly narrower 225s up front and wider 295s at the rear to suit the rear wheel drive.
Braking was handled by an AP Racing system: ventilated and slotted discs, roughly 360mm with six-piston calipers at the front, and 320mm with four-pots at the rear. Cooling came courtesy of twin triangular ducts placed aside the front grille.
Physically, the ZZII measured 4.30 metres long, 1.96 wide and just 1.19 metres tall.
While the production body was meant to be carbon fibre, the prototype wore hand-laid fiberglass. The panels, finished in black gelcoat, were produced by Fujio Yagi's Meisan, a Kyoto-based shop specialising in FRP and polycarbonate moulding.
Officially, the target weight was 1000kg — plausible for a carbon-bodied car, less so for a 4WD prototype, which AUTOBACS listed at just under 1200kg. Some speculated the 1000kg figure referred to the fiberglass car, implying a carbon version could have weighed as little as 900. Tomita indeed states that the car as it is weighs less than a tonne.
The aesthetics were designed by Design Apple, a design and architecture studio of the Nishida brothers in Kyoto; of the two, Noriyuki was already designing bodykits for Tommy Kaira since 1998. You can see him in the last picture posing with the ZZ-II.
The style is probably one of the most remarkable sides of the ZZ-II: despite 20 years have gone by since the approval of the final design on 18th December 2000, aesthetics haven’t been affected too much by the passing of time, especially taking into account that today there is a herd of angry looking supercars out there.
In that time, at the turn of the two millennia, supercars didn’t look mean yet, in contrast to what we are used to see today. The "competitors", the Ferrari 360 Challenge Stradale, the Porsche 996 GT3, the Dodge Viper GTS, the Aston Martin Vanquish, even the Lamborghini Diablo, are fluffy lambs compared to such a sleek, aggressive, tense and sculpted design as the one of the ZZ-II.
Kaira overseen the designing process. The first concept was a proper racecar with number plates. One of the key features of the ZZ-II was the light and stiff aluminium tub frame, so, as you can see both in drawings and in early models, a portion of it was intended to be exposed on the side of the car. The same goes for the upper part of the chassis, with exposed roof arches.
However, later the concept was slightly turned into a more refined supercar, so the frame had to be hidden. The core of the design would become tense lines, edges, and complex surfaces.
As I said earlier, Nishida was previously appointed with the second gen ZZ,, called ZZ EVO, which was intended to be offered in a coupé version, but that wasn’t ever finalized.
A couple of years later, after the concept of the ZZ-II veered from the hardcore track car to a refined supercar, he recovered some of the drawings of the ZZ coupé and evolved them to fit the layout of the ZZ-II.
Characteristic elements are the large pointy black headlights that extend three-dimensionally on the wheel arch; the raised central portion of the front end, bulked in order to accommodate the radiator; the two unusual split airscopes on the roof; the short, wide and wrap-around rear end, pointing upwards like on sports-prototypes, with its double circular headlights arranged on two levels; the large air diffuser with two exhaust on its sides, the side air vent that digs a groove up to the front wheel...
Oddly, the Gran Turismo saga features the ZZ-II in its fleet since the second chapter, following the styling developments which are comparable to the sketches by Design Apple (of December 2000), but from Gran Turismo 3 onwards it no longer updated the polygonal model of the car, which remained to the 1:5 scale maquette of late 2000. Therefore on the Polyphony Digital's series the ZZ-II never got featured as it was manufactured.
The ZZII is not exempt from featuring parts already existing on other cars.
The most surprising one would be the windows, which come straight from a ZZT23 Toyota Celica, together with the wiper blades.
Although the belt lines differ significantly between the two cars, don't be fooled by that, as the window itself goes further down into the body.
The rear side window on the ZZII is not actually a window, it's a black panel, in case you were wondering. Although it doesn't meet a function, it's a necessary styling feature.
The front and side indicators come instead from a regular T20 Celica, with the front being the clear lens version. The side indicator however is shared with many Toyota models across the late '90s and early 2000s, other than the 6-gen Celica.
As for the taillights, they're some Bosch K-33211, a spare rear lamp for semi-trailers, which uses the same shared "bullseye" design as some other companies, like Hella. It's hard to spot on heavy commercial vehicles as it was offered as an alternative to the "hamburger-design" version, which instead was always original equipmen, and it's taking over in demand, meaning the "bullseye" is getting discontinued even by Hella.
With a degree of freedom in make, design, and upgrades, this tail lamp has been fitted to cars like the Lancia Flaminia Super Sport, the Maserati Barchetta, the Isdera Commendatore 112i, and the Pagani Zonda in some early versions, other than the ZZII itself.
Last and unexpectedly, the external mirrors cowls and stalks come from a first generation Audi TT (8N) and, while on the Audi they look proportionated if not even small, on the ZZII look almost huge and bulky
