MOTORSPORT: Nissan comes out to play at Le Mans

The radical front-engined, front-wheel-drive hybrid that is to be Nissan’s challenger to the might of Audi, Porsche and Toyota at the Le Mans 24-Hour will make its public debut this weekend.

Sunday is the official test day for the 83rd running of France’s twice-round-the-clock sports car event a fortnight later.

Le Mans can lay claim to being the world’s greatest motor race, primarily because of the commitment manufacturers have to it but also the crowd it draws – reported to have been 263,000 last year.

Nissan’s GT-R LM NISMO was scratched from the first two rounds of this year’s World Endurance Championship (WEC), having failed crash-testing, but it has been trialled extensively in America before three of them were transported to France.

The twin-turbocharged 3-litre V6 GT-R LM is reported to have up to 1,600 horsepower and phenomenal straight-line speed.

Audi, which has won 16 times – including the past five years straight – in the 16 years it has competed at Le Mans, also is fielding three cars, as is its Volkswagen group stablemate Porsche, which is in its second year back in top-level prototype sports car racing after having already won the French classic a record 16 times.

Last year Porsche fielded two cars, neither of which made it to the finish – although the one in which Australia’s Mark Webber made his return to the event led only a couple of hours from the chequered flag.

The 919 Hybrid that Webber will drive this time, along with German veteran Timo Bernhard and young New Zealander Brendon Hartley, will be sport a red livery in honour of the marque’s first Le Mans-winning car, a 917, in 1970.

Toyota is the reigning champion constructor in the WEC but has never won Le Mans. It is fielding only two of its TS040 hybrids, with Kazuki Nakajima, who suffered a fractured vertebrae at the recent Spa Six-Hour in Belgium, hoping to become the first Japanese driver to win the 24-Hour.

He is paired with the WEC’s reigning champion drivers, Sebastien Buemi of Switzerland and Anthony Davidson of Great Britain, while one of the other Toyota’s three drivers is Austrian Alexander Wurz, a two-time winner seeking a third victory with a third manufacturer after successes with TWR-Porsche (in 1996) and Peugeot (in 2009, when Aussie David Brabham was one of his co-drivers).

Ryan Briscoe, 12th in last weekend’s Indianapolis 500 open-wheeler race in America, is the other Australian in this year’s Le Mans, driving a Chevrolet Corvette C7.R with Denmark’s Jan Magnussen and Spaniard Antonio Garcia. They’ve already had class wins at the Daytona 24-Hour and Sebring 12-Hour in the US this year.

Bowlby has claimed that the GT-R LM’s key strengths are “efficiency, stability and straight-line speed”, which he said were the product of its aerodynamics, “which in turn were only possible to achieve because of the forward positioning of the transmission and engine and our commitment to run front-wheel-drive”.

“Front downforce is generated more efficiently, with less drag,” Bowlby said.

“Moreover, with the front-end doing most of the work we could trim-out the rear wing and save even more drag, which is invaluable at Le Mans (where top speeds can approach 350kmh).

“We chose a powerful, compact twin-turbo V6 like that in the GT-R road car, especially because it meant we also had room to package the ERS (energy recovery system) in the front.

“By mounting the gearbox ahead of the engine and the crash structure ahead of that, we have a chassis that has all its major mass over the driven wheels, gives us all-important forward aerodynamic balance we’d been chasing, and lends itself to a very efficient, low-drag teardrop shape.

“So much of the Le Mans circuit is comprised of long, high-speed straights. Low drag gives us a high top speed to eat up those straights!

“Having a straight-line speed advantage is also the simplest, safest way to pass other cars.

“We’ve tried to make a car that gives our drivers that comfort factor of knowing they’ll be able to pass at high speed rather than having to ‘mug’ slower traffic in the braking areas and corners. It’s a less stressful, less fatiguing, smarter way to race.

“Low drag also aids fuel efficiency. The amount of fuel consumed in a lap is now mandated, so you may not exceed those limits prescribed by the rules and regulations. “Low drag means you’re not sat on the straights for a long time with wide throttle openings, so not only does a slippery shape mean you’re going faster but it also means you’re using less fuel and thus increasing your efficiency.”

Regarding the GT-R LM’s propulsion system, Bowlby said: “In simple terms we have gone with a petrol-electric system comprised of a compact, twin-turbocharged 3-litre petrol V6 internal combustion engine and a mechanical flywheel kinetic ERS that runs in the 2MJ (megajoule) class. (Toyota is running in the 6MJ class and Audi and Porsche in 8MJ).

“Turbocharged V6 engines are something of a NISMO speciality, so our philosophy was to build a super-efficient version, which has excellent drivability at relatively low rpm.

“It’s very, very torquey with a very flat power curve, which means we need only run with a five-speed gearbox. This means we’re changing gear less and putting less wear-and-tear on the transmission components.

“The engine also has spectacular thermal efficiency, so we extract the most power we can from every last drop of petrol we use.

“We are running a flywheel-based ERS, as Audi does, but where they use an electrical linkage we have gone with a mechanical system. It’s different and it’s smart and it has huge power potential.

“In tests on the dyno we’ve comfortably produced 1100bhp from our 8MJ KERS system alone. Combined with the internal combustion engine that means we have the potential for a little over 1600bhp at our disposal.

“Unfortunately due to the project’s extremely challenging timeframe – less than a year to form the team and design, engineer and develop the car from scratch – we’ve had to be pragmatic and scale things back with the hybrid system for this year.

“That’s the flipside of innovation: it hurts when all the pieces don’t quite come together in time. However, we are going to learn a huge amount about getting the maximum from the V6 petrol engine in this year’s race, and we’ll be back with full force in 2016.”

It was only Van Gisbergen’s second outing in the car, after a visit to Italy’s Monza where it had not been anywhere near as competitive, and just his third Blancpain race, having taken part in Belgium’s Spa 24-Hour last year.

He will miss the next Blancpain round at France’s Paul Ricard circuit because of a clash with Darwin’s V8 Supercar event on the third weekend of June.
In the three-hour race at Silverstone last weekend he took over the Von Ryan Racing entry from co-driver Rob Bell during a full-course yellow after 45 minutes.

He maintained the 40-second lead the McLaren had until he handed it over to Frenchman Kevin Estre, who drove it to the chequered flag 23 seconds in front of a WRT Audi R8 LMS ultra.

Thrilled to notch his first victory in Europe, Van Gisbergen will rejoin Von Ryan Racing at Spa in late July.

Davison, who was classified 27th in the Indy 500 after the foul-up in the Dale Coyne Racing pits where he was released unsafely and knocked over two crew working on another car, returns to sports car and GT racing in Motor City.

He will be back at the wheel of an Aston Martin Vantage in the United Sports Car Championship, in which he is just seven points off the lead, and a Nissan GT-R NISMO GT3 in the Pirelli World Challenge.

He won a Pirelli series race at Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama only a month ago but was only ninth and 20th in two races at Mosport in Canada fortnight ago and sits ninth in that championship.

Will Power, runner-up to Colombian Juan Pablo Montoya in the Indy 500 by little more than one-tenth of a second, is the sole Australian in the field for the IndyCar double-header in Detroit.

Not only are the IndyCars racing twice there at an event promoted by Roger Penske, they will race four times in 15 days with rounds at Texas Motor Speedway on June 6 and the Toronto street circuit in Canada on June 14.

Power trails Penske teammate Montoya by 25 points after the six rounds  so far in the 16-race season, with New Zealander Scott Dixon third – 61 points behind Montoya.

The Stadium Super Trucks were a huge hit at this year’s opening round of the V8 Supercar Championship in Adelaide and will form the support card with the Porsche Carrera Cup, V8 utes and the new Formula 4 open-wheelers at the Gold Coast 600.

Meanwhile, the Ferrari-engined A1GP cars have been bought for a reported $A3 million by a syndicate planning a new series with them in South Africa.

While the cars retain their Ferrari V8 motors they are without the electronics to run them because the Magnetti Marelli engine control units and steering wheels were returned to Italy when A1GP collapsed.

The AFRIX syndicate plans four events in South Africa this summer and bigger schedule the next season, perhaps with races elsewhere in Africa.

One of the syndicate members, Alan Eve, told Autosport.com that alternative electronics packages for the engines were being evaluated.

Eve said the cars already had been shipped to Johannesburg and that the syndicate hoped to entice international drivers to race them during the northern-hemisphere winter.

“The plan at the moment is to run the cars from under one roof,” Eve said.

“But nothing is set in stone. We could invite teams from Europe to run two or four cars each.”