Tuners agree: Nissan 370Z is Z winner and still champion

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It’s nice when the hometown auto show occasions the global debut of a new car, nicer still when that car is the stuff of fanboy legend. A few days before last week’s L.A. Auto Show -- when the redesigned 2009 Nissan 370Z was still squirreled away under the silk sheets somewhere -- we got a hold of the car for a few days of testing and flogging.

The review will appear Dec. 5 in the dead tree edition, but here’s the early juice: The car gains some much needed horsepower (now to 332 hp out of Nissan’s evergreen V6 engine). The new Z is lighter and stiffer. The clunky crossbar brace in back is gone. The styling is more aggressive and flamboyant. And the car’s six-speed manual offers a fantastic new feature that blips the throttle heel-and-toe style when you downshift. There are a lot of sequential gearboxes and automatics that do this, but this is the first gated shifter so equipped. Now I can wear my Allen Edmonds.

In the video we take the car to visit members of its core audience, the techs at FastAuto Works tuner shop in Arcadia. Check it out.

-- Dan Neil