2002 Nissan Sentra SE-R; It'll make you fast, but in no way furious.(Brief Article)

Could there be a more perfect time for a new Sentra SE-R? Sixteen- to 24-year-old males across the country are going nuts for inexpensive, easy-to-modify sport compacts. Almost every other manufacturer, from conservative Honda and Toyota to Mitsubishi and Ford, has jumped into the fray. And almost everyone who's been to a movie this summer has heard about The Fast and the Furious, the 21st century version of a hot rod movie based on sport compact cars and their hard-drivin', hard-lovin' owners. ``The import scene,'' as it's called, is big business and it makes good business sense to get into it now, while it's still growing.

If anything, Nissan should be criticized for waiting so long to offer this model, so many years after the whole import scene got big enough that even Honda became aware that it existed. It's a wonder Nissan, with all that performance heritage (remember the Datsun 510?), has sat out for so long.

But then, Nissan did go through that whole almost-out-of-business thing from which it is only now recovering. So cut 'em some slack. And we can be even more forgiving, because the Sentra SE-R succeeds so well at its mission.

``It's a typical kind of factory hot rod where we take a motor from a bigger car and jam it into a smaller car,'' said SE-R product planner Joel Weeks.

And that simple formula, used to make everything from Pontiac GTOs to AMG Mercedes, still works.

It sure makes the SE-R fun to drive. One of the main reasons for that, and what separates the Sentra SE-R from the competition, is its optional helical limited-slip differential. The 1991-94 SE-R also had a limited-slip, you may recall. Despite this new car's attributes, and they are many, it's hard to beat a limited-slip for making use of all the pow-er the engineers gave it. No other competitor offers one, which means even a competitor making more horsepower (i.e. the Acura RSX Type-S) has a good chance of losing in an impromptu street race due to overzealous wheelspin by an excitable young pilot. It's not always how much power you get at the flywheel, or even at the wheels, but how much gets translated into motion when you put it down on the pavement.

That limited-slip was one reason the old SE-R was beloved by autocrossers and grassroots motorsports types throughout its three-year production run. When we wrote an AutoFile on the last SE-R a decade ago the majority of the responses we received from owners were people who raced their cars. The limited-slip was a genuine rarity back then, as it is today.