You wouldn’t usually be able to do this. Most cars that look like the ’50 are no more than shells. Pretty, hollow Trojans, woven from parts-bin skeletons and 3D-printed dreams. To drive one, there are usually rafts of excuses, avalanches of caveats, and paltry mileage limits.

Italdesign and Nissan, on the other hand, when asked if Top Gear could abduct the GT-R50 from the New York Autoshow and roadtrip it, simply put its collective finger to its metaphorical lips, paused… and then asked to come along. Having it trawl through New York’s architectural greatest hits in traffic – including the Oculus Station next to the World Trade Center Memorial, the Flatiron Building, the mini-l’Arc de Triomphe… thing, DUMBO and various others – is downright bizarre.

This is a uniquely confident stance, in my experience, but I’ll go with it. The idea is to take this rolling showcase and roadtrip it through New York state to Delaware, to a place called Dover International Speedway, a one-mile NASCAR track that opened exactly 50 years ago. The same year the GT-R name was born in Japan, the same year Italdesign licked its first corporate pencil and set to work, and the reason for the GT-R50’s existence.

We tour, and chat. We draw crowds wherever we park up. We very possibly trend. It gets a bit annoying after a while, to be honest, because people get a bit silly around the car – and so we strike out from the bottom of Manhattan Island over the Brooklyn Bridge, cut down across the Verrazzano-Narrows and lope off to Staten Island. From there, it’s off towards Philadelphia, before cutting down towards the Wharton State Forest, aiming for Atlantic City and our second overnight.

The GT-R50 is… odd. Familiar but beautifully out-of-kilter. The interior feels like a carbonised GT-R, but the shapes and volumes – even the acoustics – have changed. The roof is chopped, the rear window longer, the whole back end carved out to give negative volume around the characteristic circular quad of tail-lamps.

The front is similarly sharpened, needling down into a car that looks as if it will slice eyeballs if you stare too long. Aggressive and a little flash, like a Great White with a gold tooth. There’s a visual heft to a standard GT-R, a thickness. It’s not a car that runs to fat, as such, but the bulk is left deliberate and in-yer-face. The GT-R50 is less so. A more sculpted form, with more sinew on show. There are still deep swathes of surface, but they run to slimmer lines.

Concentration ensues, all the way to Atlantic City, where I am immediately accosted by the police. Ah yes, Atlantic City. A one-time haven of legal gambling just down the summery railroad tracks from New York, now a slightly run-down, seasidey side-note. Off season, it’s like a massive Skegness, slumped under a drizzly sky. There are bright spots – some of the newer casinos still have the predatory razzmatazz of their Vegas brethren, but there are quite a few that are either run-down or closed – they keep the lights on so that the skyline doesn’t look gappy and depressing.

It is here that I get noticed by the local law enforcement, but Scott the policeman is simply an ardent GT-R fan who initially thinks he’s caught the next-generation GT-R out in the open. He’s no less excited when he realises its the ’50, and offers us a police escort to our next location – which would be rude to refuse. Trouble is, it’s dark, and I therefore spend the next 20 minutes glued to the back bumper of an Atlantic City Police SUV hoping that he doesn’t realise I can’t see anything if he gets more than 20 feet away. Cringing, we’re saved by a small-but-important emergency that sees Scott disappear in a screech of tyres and firework of blue and red lights.

That night’s hotel is… bad. The kind of place where the floors are sticky, the lifts broken and the hygiene scarily optional. There is a four-berth jacuzzi in the centre of my room, of which I will not speak. And we parked the ’50 in the world’s dodgiest multi-storey car park: so never let it be said that this trip wasn’t real. The next morning, joy of joys, the car is still there, and I insulate my arteries with what was described as a ‘waffle’, but could be more accurately encapsulated by the term ‘breakfast diabetes’. Like eating a sugar-covered duvet.

We venture out into AC for a morning, and discover that when the economic engines don’t huff much, a town idles. We shoot in an abandoned casino previously owned by the current president of the USA, revelling in the dystopian excess. There are bits hanging off the buildings, but those lights stay on. Glittery from a distance, less attractive up close. Soon though, it all gets a bit depressing. So we hoick out around Delaware Bay and down towards Dover, using only backroads. Which is where it gets weird. Weirder.

‘Sunset shots in a picturesque swamp’ makes it sound more bizarre than it actually is, it has to be said. But the vibe is good somewhere near the Bombay Hook Reserve – wind-bent, arthritic tree chorusing poetically with water and a vaguely nuclear sunset. The latter happily bouncing off the former like some Eighties car advert. The GT-R50 looks glorious. There are country roads, and bends to play on. There is also a ratty-looking dual-cab pickup parked in the layby up from where we take pictures. As I pull up next to it, a huge bear of a man clad in penitentiary orange calmly steps out, reaches into the bed and pulls out a simply enormous compound bow. And a single, white, arrow.

‘Race postponed until Monday’ are the words I’ve been dreading. We’ve made it to Dover Speedway, but our slot to shoot on the actual track was the day after the race before heading back to New York. Frantic rearrangements later, including insuring a million-pound one-off for track driving (which isn’t as easy as it sounds), we secure a possible Tuesday morning shoot. A very short Tuesday morning shoot, as long as it doesn’t rain again.

We watch NASCAR, and I chew my fingernails off and check the forecast every twenty minutes. I don’t sleep much. But the next morning, the GT-R50 finally meets the 50-year old Monster Mile. We take pictures with the 46ft fibreglass ‘Monster Monument’, feed down into a pitlane scattered with hundreds of wheelnuts abandoned by the race teams that raced here just hours before. It’s utterly wonderful.

The GT-R50 transforms, becomes the most technical NASCAR ever. The mile is banked all the way around, with 9º on the straights and 24º on the ends. At 170+mph that the racers get through here, it must be like a wall of death. With a possible 95,000 fans in the stands, the feeling must be incredible, if a bit blurry. Of course, the GT-R is imperious, hoofing around without a care, reaching speeds our insurers would rather not read about. I have to be careful not to scrape the front splitter exiting the track from banked to flat, but other than that, it’s just a strange and satisfying daydream to be driving this car here, at this precise moment in time.

Fifty years. The GT-R, Italdesign and Dover Speedway have all been around longer than I’ve been alive. But too soon, it’s over. A few brief laps, lots of pictures and we have to be on the road to get the GT-R back to NY to ship. A flurry of fuel stops and fast food, hours of dull freeway enlivened by brief reaches into the deep well of Nismo talent. Car back, cab, aeroplane… there’s barely time to breathe. But we did it.