The Nissan GT-R may be getting on in years now, but the latest refreshed Nismo version is still something special. To be honest, every version of the GT-R has been excellent, and over the past 50 years, the Skyline name has captured the imagination of sports car enthusiasts. ItalDesign has also been around for half a century, and the two companies announced a collaboration back in 2019 to celebrate this. Development of this exceptionally rare supercar has been underway for some time, and to whet our appetites for its arrival, Nismo has now released a video showing how the engine has been honed to produce its remarkable figure of 710 horsepower.

While the recently revealed Nismo Special Edition is mightily impressive with its 600 horses and 481 lb-ft of torque, a super rare and extraordinary car like the GT-R50 by Italdesign needs to outperform its so-called lesser siblings to be truly worthy of that fascinating body, and when the car costs $1.12 million, you want to be confident in its abilities.

To ensure this, Nismo says that "the durability and reliability of the engine and transaxle [were] confirmed by performing benchtop simulation durability (acceleration durability) testing on a four-wheel chassis dynamometer". With virtual simulations of tracks like the Nurburgring a fundamental part of testing too, the exceptional GT-R50 will be capable of withstanding racing conditions.

Of course, it is highly unlikely that the customers who can afford such a car will ever dare take it to the track, especially since replacing a car that is one of 50 is pretty much impossible. Nevertheless, Nismo tested the car on the track in real life too. When that happened, Italdesign hinted that we'd see the first customer delivery occur early in 2021. We're now almost deep into the second quarter and are still waiting, but with so much intensive testing occurring, the wait will be worthwhile for those lucky customers who managed to snag one. Let's just hope this isn't the last time we see a GT-R launched with an internal combustion engine.