Happy Veterans day. Welcome again to another DLM cars from 1/64 and smaller and sometimes larger. Continuing the history of the Skyline in celebration of their 60th anniversary this year, my 71st post is about the C10 known as Hakosuka.
By the way I‘ve previously written info about some of the models themselves like the Matchbox blue and silver coupe GTX including the Tomica blue Deluxe where I discussed about interior variants, reviews and more.
You’ve probably seen countless info about the Skyline on the internet and wondered why do another one. I thought why not as there are probably still a lot of LaLD readers who may not yet be familiar with this an opportunity to read it all here.
As I became more curious about what many in the die cast and real car world who refer to the Skyline as Hakosuka I began my quest to know more about it. It seems this term would be used quite often and is almost synonymous with the Skyline name. But is it all the Skylines and how did it all started? I would like to give credit to some websites like wikipedia, Hemmings.com, nissan-gtr-turbo.info and JapaneseNostalgiccars.com for some of the information.
For the beginners, the 3rd generation Skyline, introduced as the C10 series in July 1968 began its development under Prince at the company’s Ogikubo R&D centre in the suburbs of Tokyo and was marketed with a Nissan badge after the merger between Nissan and Prince in 1966. By the time the C10 went on sale, the Prince nameplate had been completely phased out on cars and trucks.
Fans of this series nicknamed it Hakosuka for its boxy styling, (hako means “box”; suka is the Japanese pronunciation of “sky” or short for Skyline), became one of the most beloved cars in Japan’s motoring history thanks to the introduction of the Skyline GT-R. With a four-valve-per-cylinder, triple-carb, twin-cam six and a four-wheel independent suspension with semi-trailing arms, it dominated Japanese touring car racing in the late 60s and early 70s.
There were several different models made and the first one was a 4 door sedan with Prince’s 1.5 L OHC G15 I4 like the S57. A 1.8 L G18 version was also available. A station wagon (Estate) variant, known previously as the Prince Skyway, was offered with this generation. A hardtop coupé was introduced in October 1970. In September 1971, the KGC10 2000 GT-X received a 2.0 L (1,998 cc) L20SU straight-six engine instead of the Prince G-7 engine. The chassis was already designed to fit a straight six, to avoid the S54 extension problem. 130 PS (96 kW) was available from this new engine. In March 1972 the lineup was expanded to include a four-door GT-X sedan.
The die cast models shown from left is the Skyline 1500 Deluxe which came in 1.5 L with 88 -95 hp, Skyline Estate (VPC10 DX?) hp unknown (Both Tomica TLVs) and the blue and silver 2000 GT-X which came in 2.0 L with 130 hp from Matchbox.
Also GT stands for Gran Turismo.
Some of you may be wondering since we’re on the subject of the birth of Hakosuka, shouldn’t the GT-R (some implied is when fans started the nickname) be included as well? Good question and the GT-R shall be discuss in a future blog.
I know I’ve only scratch the surface of this fantastic car so if you have any more info please feel free to contribute.
If you missed part 3 of the Skyline series, click below.