Rumours are currently doing the internet rounds that the new Nissan Juke-R has been born without the approval of execs in Japan.
Which, given the massive marketing push behind the challenging-looking
crossover with the innards of the mighty R35 GT-R
, we found extremely odd. Cue a spot of interrogation of Nissan UK high-ups.
And it seems that there is a grain of truth (albeit a small one) in story progenitor Autoblog's original article.
"The Juke R is a Nissan Europe project that's been undertaken with the full backing of management in Japan," A senior Nissan source told us. Apparently there is one person who's not fully behind the project, however, and that's Kazutoshi Mizuno, the 'father of the GT-R'.
Then again, Mizuno-san is famously protective of his baby, and we're sure that to him turning the GT-R into the Juke-R is akin to someone painting a clown face on the Mona Lisa...
But there is one thing we want to take the fine folks at Autoblog to task on: calling the folks at Cranfield (who started the project) and RML (who have taken it on subsequently) 'a bunch of rag-tag engineers'. These are the people responsible for engineering the Qashqai and Juke and, in the case of RML, running successful WTCC, BTCC and Le Mans campaigns. The cheek of it...