Three seconds flat. That's how long it took this AMS-tuned 2009 Nissan GT-R to hit 60 mph from a standstill. Doesn't sound like much when it's just words on a screen, does it? Allow us to assist you with the miracle of perspective:

By our measure, a stock GT-R clocks that same milestone somewhere between 3.5 and 3.8 seconds (no rollout for any of these numbers; by now you know the routine). And zapping a full 16 percent from a 3.5-second run requires a lot more mechanical chutzpah than your average armchair tuner can muster in his garage — despite what he might tell you on the Internet.

What's more, we've driven a few fast cars in our day. Like, say, this one, which tried to kill us six ways from Sunday. Or this one, which was insanely quick but still far off the pace of this GT-R.

But this thing, in terms of ease of use, speed from one point to another and road presence, trumps them all. It is one honking fast machine. Faster, in fact, considering both elapsed time and trap speed, than anything else we've ever tested.

Wow
Just for fun, we'll walk you through AMS's recommended launch procedure, but first a little history lesson: Back when the GT-R first landed on North American soil it arrived with a launch control system akin to most others. Punch the right buttons in the right order, wood the brake, wood the throttle, release the brake and let the magic begin. Simple.

All was good and fine until one too many hoon hounds broke his GT-R's tranny in a fit of all-wheel-drive-burnout-induced lunacy. Nissan countered with a statement which excluded from warranty coverage any damage induced with traction control switched off — a threat it could enforce, in theory at least, via onboard data logging.

Hoon hounds whined, Internet forums buzzed and we could have sworn we saw the fiery inferno of the Nissan blogosphere from as far away as Wyoming late one night. But Nissan wasn't finished. Soon it released GT-R launch control version 2.0. The calibration arrived via a simple dealer ECU reflash and changed everything. Instead of raising engine speed to 5,000 rpm and climactically dropping the clutch, the updated launch control did quite the opposite. Now the system simply raised engine speed slowly to about 2,700 rpm and, upon release of the brake, fed in the clutch far less violently.

Naturally, many hooners ignored a dealer near them and continued to hammer their GT-Rs with impunity. Few transmissions actually broke. Other owners, including us, welcomed the update, which proved even quicker in our testing.

So Here We Are
And that, friends, brings us to this test. Martin Musial, president of AMS Performance, is parked beside us in the passenger seat, instructing us how to trick launch control version 2.0 into giving us just a little more oomph. The trick, he explains, is to pin the brake, pin the throttle, rapidly release the brake and stomp it to the floor again while holding the throttle wide open. In theory, this sends the engine speed skyrocketing to about 4,000 rpm where it stabilizes for a few seconds before the brake is released — for real this time — and the car, again, theoretically, leaves the line like a scalded ape.