Continued from; “Skyline History, Part 2.“

In the early 60′s, the Skyline was to take another path.   Autumn of 1960 the Italian designer Giovanni Michelotti was asked by Prince, to design for them a Coupe for the Skyline range.  The result was the BLRA-3 Prince Skyline Sport.  This car became commercially available to the public in April of 1962.  It was available in both Hardtop (R21A) and Convertible (R21B) forms.

Prince Skyline Sport BLRA-3 (R21A & R21B)

The Sport ran the same GB4 engine and using the chassis of the BLSI-3, the wheelbase was identical to all previous models of Skyline but the shell was wider, longer, though obviously a sight shorter than it’s predecessors.

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Continued from; “Skyline History, Part 1.”

As mentioned, the rest of the 1st Generation of Skyline did not change dramatically from the very first release.  Cosmetic and minor mechanical advances were made, the compression of the engine was increased to up the performance on the higher capacity and sportier versions and the car sold enough and was popular enough to maintain it’s production.

The second release of the Skyline was the ALSI-2.

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Now, those who know me, those who know of me and even some random people who encounter me on the street.  All seem to know for one reason or another, that I’m a fan of Skyline automobiles.  In-particular, the older ones.  The ones from before when the masses seem to think they were even made.  I guess that, in order to be the owner of 1963 and 1973 variants of the Skyline range, you’d surely have to like them at least a little bit, right?

So, what I thought I would do, is create a history series, that will cover a good part of what I know about the cars, right from the start.  The bits that most people miss out in articles because they’re not “sporty” enough, or the bits they chose to exclude because it wasn’t indicative of the now legendary racing lineage.  All that kind of jazz.

So, without further delay and ranting, I shall begin…

The name itself comes from a few years prior to the production of the car.

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