Nismo R-Tune Altima

June 21, 2006 - A while back, we brought you an article on Nismo's R-Tune Altima. In case you missed that brilliant piece of automotive journalism, let us recap the article for you. Nissan had its performance division -- Nismo -- design a couple of performance packages for its mid-sized sedan. These performance packages come in two flavors: R-Tune and S-Tune. Both of these packages come with extreme suspension upgrades, which allow the Nismo Altima to boast a skid pad number of over .9Gs. This same suspension upgrade also allows the Nismo Altima to run through the slalom 10 miles per hour faster than the stock car. The main difference between the R-Tune and S-Tune cars is the engine: the street-tuned S-Tune car uses a 3.5-liter V6 that really only gets a new exhaust. The race-tuned R-Tune Altima actually has the smaller 2.5 liter four-banger. However, this four cylinder engine gets a cold air intake, more aggressive cams, a header and a cat-back exhaust, and according to Nissan, this four-cylinder R-Tune Altima is much faster than the V6-powered S-Tune. Well, it's been almost a year since we abused the Nismo Altimas at the track, and since a new Altima is on the way, we had to act fast if we wanted to drive the "old" Altima one more time. We somehow convinced the people at Nissan to loan us the R-Tune Altima for a week. We loved this car on the track, but we wanted to know if this car's track-worthiness would make the car unlivable on the street. We'll start off by saying that the majority of people will dislike driving a R-Tune Altima on the street. But then, the majority of people don't care about real performance, and the majority of people don't even know what Nismo is. Nismo didn't build the R-Tune Altima for these people, so their opinions don't matter. The people that know and understand (and even love) Nismo will find that the R-Tune Altima does everything they want and more. The inside of the R-Tune Altima is nothing special. Outside of the Nismo shift knob and floor mats, this cockpit looks like any other Altima 2.5S. It's not the fanciest interior out there, but it gets the job done. We would have liked to have seen a more aggressive seat or steering wheel or something, but we understand that pieces like that aren't financially feasible.