Legendary actor and filmmaker Robert Redford passed away yesterday at the age of 89. Though he wasn’t as well-known for being a car guy as his buddy Paul Newman, Redford did have a penchant for vintage cars and racing. As it happens, he helped get Newman hooked on motorsports, and the car he did it with, in a remarkable coincidence, also helped make the Nissan Skyline the icon that it is in Japan.
From Observer‘s 2008 tribute to Newman when he passed, Redford said this:
Mostly I’ll miss the fun we had. We played lots of pranks on each other. I used to race cars, and after he took this rare Porsche I owned for a drive, he began to get into racing. He had incredible reflexes, and he got really good, but he talked so much about it that I got sick of it.
That Porsche was a 1964 904 GTS that was sold at a Bonham’s auction in 2022 for $1.5 million. The 904 was a mid-engined race car purpose-built to take on the likes of Ferrari and Alfa Romeo in European enduros such as the Targa Florio and Le Mans. Those who know the history of the Skyline, particularly the Prince Skyline 2000GT, will recognize the 904 GTS as the car, though not the exact one owned by Redford, that Tetsu Ikuzawa passed in his No.41 Skyline at the 1964 Japan Grand Prix.
Though the Prince Skyline, essentially a family saloon stretched to accommodate a straight-six engine, led the race just briefly before the Porsche regained and won the race, it was enough. The Japanese crowd couldn’t believe that a home-grown sedan cobbled together at the dawn of Japan’s auto industry, could overtake a race car from an established European marque.
On this side of the Pacific, Newman went on to win four SCCA championships, mostly behind the wheel of various Nissans. His fame helped bring a lot of attention to auto racing as a sport, and Nissan as a brand. Newman was so closely associated with Nissan that he appeared in a series of ads for the R30 Skyline, and Nissan even issued a Newman Edition version of the car.
It’s not clear if Redford was aware of the connection between his Porsche and the Skyline, but as Redford said in one of his most famous movie roles, “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.”
