Wagons rarely get the full tuning treatment anywhere, and they get it even less often when the donor car is a Nissan that never officially reached the United States. Kids Heart went in a different direction with this one, taking an M35 Stagea and turning it into what the shop billed as the first R35 GT-R wagon. Our resident photographer in Japan, Christopher Jue, shot the car for the feature, and the images have found a permanent home in the Tunerzine archives.
The shop behind it is worth knowing if you don’t already. Kids Heart operates out of Aichi Prefecture as both a tuning shop and a used car dealership, with a reputation built on serious drift cars for the street and the track. The name that tends to come up first in connection with the shop is D1 Grand Prix driver Tsuyoshi Tezuka, who works there as a manager, though the business itself was founded by Masakazu Takayama in the late 1990s and is also known for building the Nissan-approved Sileighty conversion.
The donor car explains a lot about why this conversion was even possible. The M35 Stagea was never sold in the United States, and in Japan it existed largely to compete with Subaru’s Legacy wagon. Underneath, it rides on the V35 platform, the same architecture we know in the States as the G35 sedan and the 350Z, which means the Stagea benefits from a deep aftermarket and a long list of engine swap options. Nissan even offered a factory turbocharged all-wheel-drive version rated at 276 hp (280 PS), though the car Kids Heart started with here is the rear-wheel-drive Stagea.
Shared platforms suggest an easy conversion, but that isn’t how this one went. The R35 GT-R is considerably wider than either a V35 Skyline or an M35 Stagea, so matching the GT-R front end profile meant the Stagea’s body had to be extended by more than 6 inches in some areas. Getting the lines to blend cleanly from the GT-R nose back through the rest of the bodywork took three months of design and fabrication, and the result looks intentional rather than grafted on.
The wheel and tire package had to move outward to keep up with the new width. Kids Heart went with 20-inch Work wheels on Goodyear LS2000 tires, spaced out to match the wider stance the conversion created. From most angles the proportions land close enough to a factory car that the obvious question is whether Nissan ever built a GT-R wagon, and the answer, as far as anyone knows, is that this is as close as it gets.
GalleryPhotos by Christopher Jue
