The car in question is the R32 Skyline GT-R, known to those who grew up on Gran Turismo and late-night YouTube rabbit holes as Godzilla. The version Sakamoto-san has just completed is not Godzilla. It is Godzilla if Godzilla had gone on an extreme diet, hired a tailor, and developed a passion for motorsport-grade carbon fibre.
Photographer Larry Chen recently visited Garage Active’s base in southern Japan, and the footage tells the story better than any press release could. The build in question is a narrowbody R32 GT-R — notable in itself because Garage Active previously showed a widebody version — constructed almost entirely from dry carbon fibre. Hood, roof, door panels, trunk, front bumper, rear bumper, interior. Carbon. The whole lot. Nine coats of clear to protect the weave, painted dry carbon being, as Sakamoto-san patiently explains, extraordinarily difficult to get right. The result weighs 1,370 kilograms. The stock R32 GT-R weighs 1,480 kilograms. That is over 100 kilograms — more than 220 pounds — removed from a car that was already considered one of the more athletic machines of its era.
The engine is an HKS 2.8-litre stroker, twin-turbocharged, producing somewhere north of 700 horsepower. The important distinction here is that Sakamoto-san tuned it for throttle response rather than peak power — the opposite of the arms race that typically accompanies builds of this ambition. It uses a five-speed OM transmission with a lightweight competition clutch. It has a full interior. Recaro seats. Working air conditioning. The rear seats, remarkably, were not deleted.
This is not a track weapon. It is, by all accounts, a road car. A road car that costs $375,000, that will tour the world for approximately a year before the customer who commissioned it is allowed to take delivery, and that represents the distilled obsession of one craftsman in one workshop on one Japanese island.
The context matters here. The R32 GT-R is a car that went racing in Australia in the late 1980s and won so comprehensively — 29 wins from 29 races in the Japanese Touring Car Championship — that competitors lobbied for it to be banned. It was never officially sold new in the United States. A generation of American enthusiasts knew it only through video games, posters, and the persistent rumour that it was better than anything they were allowed to buy. The 25-year import rule has since unlocked it for US buyers, and the market has responded accordingly. Clean, well-maintained examples are now commanding serious money globally, with provenance and service history the primary drivers of value. US demand is particularly strong, putting upward pressure on supply across Japan, Australia, and Europe.
A standard, good-condition R32 GT-R trades for somewhere between $45,000 and $90,000 depending on specification and market. The highest recorded public sale reached $99,999 in May 2025. Special editions — the V-Spec, the V-Spec II, the N1 — command considerably more, with a rare GT-R N1 fetching AUD $150,500 in early 2025. All of which makes Garage Active’s $375,000 asking price feel like a different category of purchase entirely — which, of course, it is. This is not a restored Godzilla. This is a reinterpreted one, carrying a serial number (this is car number 11 in the Garage Active full-carbon series), constructed with craft that has visibly improved with each successive build. Larry Chen’s footage is unambiguous on this point: the carbon quality, the panel fit, the painted-weave finish — it is genuinely exceptional work.
The detail that reveals perhaps the most about the philosophy here is this: Sakamoto-san chose the narrowbody specifically because R32 enthusiasts love the original shape. The widebody exists because he personally prefers it. The narrowbody exists for the customer. That distinction — between what the builder wants and what the car deserves — is not one you encounter very often in the world of high-end custom builds, where the builder’s ego frequently outweighs the brief.
Also visible in the workshop: an R34 GT-R in active development, which cannot be shown yet. A 2,000-horsepower R32 built around a billet-block 3.2-litre engine shipped from Australia, currently sitting as a bare shell that weighs almost nothing and will eventually wear a full dry carbon wide-body. A staff car being built for a Japanese actor. A very large collection of R32 dashboards.
Garage Active is, by any reasonable measure, operating at a different altitude from the broader JDM tuning world. Sakamoto-san is building cars that will be discussed and displayed and studied years from now in the same way that coachbuilders from another era are discussed today. The $375,000 price tag is not the point. The point is the intent: to take a car that millions of people around the world consider an icon, and make the most committed version of it that human hands can produce.
You will wait a year for it. You will pay a significant sum for it. And when it arrives, every single one of those nine coats of clear coat will have been worth it.
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