Even a mighty Nissan GT-R wasn’t enough to distract Nino Parello from missing his beloved modified Nissan 370Z show car. Now it’s back in the rightful hands, he’s made up for lost time and transformed it once again…
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. The phrase describes our tendency to longingly view the objects or lifestyles we don’t possess through rose-tinted spectacles. It’s one of the biggest problems us humans suffer from. And probably isn’t helped by the constant bombardment of advertisements for shiny new products that are constantly shoved under our noses.
But if you can learn to love what you already have, and even accept that things aren’t necessarily going to instantly be 10 times more amazing if you buy something new, that’s when you know you’re really winning at life. One young man who’s realised this the hard way recently is Nino here. He parted ways with his beloved modified Nissan 370Z a year or so ago to fulfil his spontaneous craving for the car’s bigger brother – an R35 GT-R. As you can probably see, though, 12 months on and his 370Z is back on the scene, after he realised just what he’d given up.
You might remember Nino’s 370Z in its previous guise before he parted ways with it. In fact, we’d be surprised if you hadn’t: it was pretty damn hard to miss! Sporting a lime green Nismo-kitted body wrap and dumped on some bling blue split rims, the car made waves around the UK scene and far beyond for being one of the most uniquely modified Zeds in existence (we even featured it on these very pages of FC back then, too).
It may have been getting a lot of love, but with a couple of successful show seasons under his belt, Nino’s attentions began to shift. We’ve all been there. “I ended up selling the car quite quickly to a trader to make way for a GT-R as the perfect one came up for sale and it’s always been a dream car of mine,” he says of how his long-term love affair with his green companion came to an abrupt and slightly deflated ending.
The tasty GT-R acted as a 25th birthday present to himself, with Nino initially loving the hilariously savage performance these boosted beasts famously offer. “It ran flawlessly for about a year, and then the gearbox and four-wheel-drive system both broke at the same time.” Cue an almost five-figure bill just to keep the car on the road. This was the point doubts began to creep in about whether he’d made the right decision after all…
“All I could think was ‘What if something like that happened again?’ I was used to wrapping cars and putting them on air ride for this amount of money, but the GT-R had nothing to show for itself apart from the fact it worked again!”
Amazingly then, despite Godzilla offering so much more on paper, it took under a year for Nino’s pangs to be back behind the wheel of his faithful 370Z to reach melting point. “I’d sold it for my dream car. But now I realised I’d already been driving my dream for many years. And all I wanted to do now was get it back and finish it off.”
Luckily, pinning down where his old coupé had got to wasn’t that hard – and not just because it was bright green! “The lady who’d bought it off the trade company I sold it to had connected with me on social media, sometimes asking me questions about how to operate the air suspension and things like that,” he tells us. Making her an offer she couldn’t refuse soon saw his most prized possession back in his…
Want to know more? Check out the full feature in Fast Car magazine issue 390 on sale now in all good shops, the Fast Car online shop or alternatively download Fast Car magazine 390 now.
