revolutionary | rɛvəˈluːʃ(ə)n(ə)ri | adjective 1. involving or causing a complete or dramatic change.synonyms: thoroughgoing, thorough, complete, total, entire, absolute, utter, comprehensive, exhaustive, sweeping, far-reaching, wide-ranging, extensive, profound The recent Super Bowl was significant - not just for the millions of football fans glued to their TVs, but also for those of us whose world, every June, revolves around a small provincial city, 120 miles to the West of Paris. Nissan chose the annual TV advertising frenzy that surrounds the Big Game to launch their latest race car, the Nissan GT-R LM NISMO. Those of you who missed the ad on the day can catch up with it below... Racing cars are supposed to be launched at a circuit, usually wet and windy, not on prime time TV, but everything about the Nissan GT-R LM NISMO defies conventional thinking. The means of communicating this brave new project is indicative of the mindset of those running the show, every assumption is to be challenged and nothing is above question. Les Vingt-Quatre Heures du Mans has a history stretching back over 90 years, but it is safe to say that rarely in its time has the great race been more relevant to the real world. The current regulations for the LM P1 class are driving the manufacturers to seek solutions to the problems of personal transportation in the Twenty-First Century. There are finite energy resources on Earth and we have to be more efficient in our consumption of these elements if we wish to retain freedom of movement in the long term. The current trio of manufacturers on the LM P1 grid, Audi, Porsche and Toyota have the benefit of a year of racing experience with these extraordinary machines under their belts. There is no way that the vehicles that these brands have brought out can be considered conventional, the differing approaches were considered in my 2014 Le Mans' review HERE and the course of the race and how the different strategies played out was dealt with HERE. However, there were some factors that were common to all three projects - rear wheel drive, mid-engine, all the other stuff you'd expect to see. The new Nissan has rejected these conventional solutions in favour of revolution. The specifications tell their own tale: Configuration: Front engine, front-wheel-drive. Engine: Nissan VRX 30A NISMO. 3.0 litre, 60 degree V6, direct injection gasoline twin-turbo. Transmission: 5-speed + reverse sequential gearbox with pneumatic paddle shift system. Epicyclic final drive reduction with hydraulic limited slip differential. Tilton 4-plate carbon clutch assembly. Chassis: FIA Homologated weight, 880 kg. Right-hand driving position. 68 litre capacity FT3 fuel tank featuring electric lift and feed pumps. ERS (Energy Recovery System) housed ahead and beneath driver’s feet in self-contained module. Bodywork: Carbon-composite body panels. Polycarbonate windscreen with hard coating CFD and full-scale wind tunnel developed ultra high efficiency bodywork geometry, adjustable rear wing. Suspension: Penske dampers with four-way adjustment front and rear, hydraulic rear anti-roll bar system. Brakes: 6-piston front and 4-piston rear calipers. NISMO Brake-by-Wire active brake ERS blending. Driver adjustable brake bias. Wheels: BBS centre-lock, magnesium forged 16”x13” front and 16”x9” rear. Tires: Michelin 31/71-16 front, 20/71-16 rear radials. Electronics: Cosworth engine control unit featuring: Engine control, gearbox control; Driver adjustable traction control, Anti-lag system control, Brake-by-wire, lift-and-coast fuel conservation, Drive-by-wire throttle control and ERS deployment strategy control. Interior: NISMO 5-point harness Lifeline lightweight extinguisher system. Data / display system: Cosworth Electronics with NISMO steering wheel mounted LCD. Dimensions: Length: 4.645 meters Width: 1.9 meters Height: 1.03 meters Minimum weight: 880 kilograms Full tank capacity: 68 litres Yes the Nissan GT-R LM NISMO is front engined and front wheel drive! And the wheels are bigger at the front than the rear, the rules of motor sport design have been turned on their head. Why? What circumstances inspired these choices which have been largely ignored by the rest of the motor racing world? A good place to start is the Garage 56 project that Nissan ran back in 2012, the Delta Wing. This extreme vision of a racing car fitted into the Nissan way of approaching motor sport. Their 'marching to a different drum' approach had kicked off with the GT Academy, getting gamers involved into the real world of motor sport. I looked at the programme a while back HERE and it has grown to a level way beyond the original ambitions of the Nissan/PlayStation partnership. The Delta Wing was an attempt to completely re-write the rule book when it came to sportscar racing, performance through ingenuity and efficiency was the mission. The media attention that the project attracted was completely out of proportion to the relatively small budget, this set the tone for the future. The NISMO brand has a reputation for being edgy and hard core. In 2014 they engaged on a project that was branded impossible by many, to race a zero emission vehicle at Le Mans. Well, as usual, the naysayers were proved wrong. The ZEOD did make it to the race in June and achieved its main objectives. I looked at the project in detail HERE. It is true that the ZEOD was the first retirement of the race, the transmission failing under the strain of the prodigious torque generated by the combined petrol and electric powerplants. However, there was much to celebrate - 300kmph top speed reached and a full lap on battery power being achieved. Given this recent ancestry it should not come as a surprise that Nissan would come up with a revolutionary solution - though it must be said that front-engined prototypes have been seen at Le Mans before. Who could forget the rumbling Panoz that graced the tracks in 1998? Panoz even attempted to race a hybrid version that year but "Sparky" failed to qualify, but did race and finish in the inaugural Petit Le Mans later that year. The following years the Panoz was adapted to a roadster specification and provided the great Mario Andretti with his final attempt to win the one honour in motor sport that had eluded him. As for front wheel drive, there is nothing new under the sun, as they say. At the Retromobile last week I spotted this Tracta dating back to 1927. A similar example was driven in the 24 Hours that year and finished. Since then several other cars have driven the power through the front wheels, the last by my reckoning was a Mini Marcos in 1967. Darren Cox, Global Head of Brand, Marketing & Sales, NISMO, has gone on record to declare that he was under instruction from Nissan's Board not to build another Audi, nor would there be Audi-level budgets available. In addition, there had to be a clear synergy between the race programme and the flagship model in the company's range, the GT-R. A front-mounted V6 turbocharged engine is a clear sign of that, even if the unit is said to have come from Cosworth, Nissan paid for it so they can call it whatever they like. “Our LM P1 programme makes the connection between NISMO on the road and NISMO on the track, showcasing our brand DNA to a global audience,” declared Cox. “We are taking motorsport to the masses, telling tales of technical innovation but also human stories via all of the exciting communications channels that are open to us now. We will innovate off the track as well as on it so you can be assured that this is just the beginning of the story.” Nissan’s LM P1 Team Principal, Ben Bowlby was also the designer and project leader on the Delta Wing and ZEOD programmes and was the logical person to take Nissan back to the top of the tree. “These cars represent the pinnacle of current racing technology: huge energy recovery systems, super fuel-efficient engines and wild aerodynamics, creating extremely fast cars for their weight and endurance."“LM P1 is a proving ground for technological innovation, especially when it comes to the power sources of the future.”“These are 24-hour racing cars that cover practically a whole Formula One season in one Le Mans race. It’s a very different challenge to F1 and much more relevant to what’s going on in road cars. If you drive from say London to Edinburgh you expect the car to get through the miles and be fast, stable, comfortable and safe and provide the handling and grip you might need if you have to come off the motorway and take some back roads, that’s the sort of challenge that Le Mans represents. It’s all about having a fast, efficient and safe car.” Nissan released an interview with Bowlby at the launch which gives us most of the solid information that we have about the details of this exciting car. So I am posting it here, as much else of what has been written about the GT-R LM NISMO is either speculation or pure conjecture. Q: Can you explain the how the different power sources work on the GT-R? A: “We have a very modern but conventional V6 3-litre twin turbo petrol engine. This is a very efficient engine so it produces a large amount of power using the allotted fuel flow limit. The fuel flow limit is one of the new regulations at Le Mans – we’re not limited by the engine capacity or the boost pressure or the RPM of the engine – we’re limited by how many grammes of fuel per second we can burn."“So the more efficient you make the engine the more power you have because you are still burning the same amount of fuel whether you are efficient or inefficient so if you can make a very efficient engine you get a lot of power. We are burning a smaller amount of fuel, around 30% less than was used by a petrol engine at Le Mans in 2013, for example."“So we have a petrol engine efficiently producing a certain amount of power and then in addition to that we are using a kinetic energy recovery system (ERS). The car is a mass, travelling at velocity and as we slow it down for the upcoming corner we harvest that kinetic energy."“We can then deploy that stored energy to accelerate the car out of the corner and because the energy recovery system can release the stored energy very quickly it makes it very powerful. Energy divided by the speed you release that energy = power."“Think about a stick of dynamite. That’s actually quite a small amount of energy but it is released in a spilt second so it makes a very big bang. The same amount of energy released over a day would hardly even manage to power a light bulb. So it’s all about how fast you release the energy. We want to release the energy very quickly to get the car back up to speed very quickly because it’s nice to spend lots of time at high speed!"“The key is to store the energy and then release it very quickly and that’s what makes our system very competitive, providing us with a good amount of power from the ERS, which we can add to the internal combustion engine’s driving power.” Q: Is the GT-R a front-wheel-drive car? A: “The Nissan GT-R LM NISMO is, in automotive-speak, a front-engined, front-wheel-drive car. The internal combustion engine drives the front wheels and the energy recovery system harvests energy from the front wheels. We’ve used the relatively low-powered internal combustion engine to drive the front wheels and then we add power from the ERS to augment acceleration.” Q: If the GT-R has all this power, will it be faster than the other manufacturer’s LM P1 cars? A: “The LM P1 regulations for manufacturers have four hybrid powertrain options, defined by how much hybrid energy is released from the ERS (Energy Recovery System) per lap of Le Mans (the Le Mans track is used as the baseline circuit).""You can go in the 2 megajoule class where you can deploy up to 2MJ of energy during one lap of Le Mans and also use quite a lot of fuel."“You can go in the 4MJ class and get a little less fuel, the 6MJ class with less still and then there’s the 8MJ class where you get the least fuel of all but the most recovered energy for deployment and there’s no limit on how powerful the system is, just how much energy is used so you can either have an awful lot of power for a very short time or a small amount of power for a very long time."“The fuel energy you have, which again can be measured in megajoules, gets cut in proportion to the amount of megajoules you get from your ERS. The way it is worked out by the governing body – the FIA and the ACO – is that if you choose to recover more energy and deploy that you actually end up with more total energy, even though your fuel energy has been cut slightly."“The more megajoules you have the faster you go. Each megajoule is worth an amount of time per lap so if you are an 8MJ car compared to a 2MJ car you should be faster over the course of a lap."“There are however some very big challenges, one of which is that you have to get the car down to the minimum weight because every 10-12 kilos is about half a second a lap around Le Mans so if you have more weight in the car that slows you down pretty significantly. The challenge is to package a big, powerful energy recovery system without going over the weight limit and that is very hard to do. We’re going to be really challenged to make our weight target of 880 kilos for 2015 when half of the weight of the car is the powertrain: engine, ERS and the driveline - so that’s a very big challenge.” Q: What about the tyres? The rears look narrower than the front tyres! A: “The front tyres on the Nissan GT-R LM NISMO are bigger than the rear tyres – 14 inch wide front vs. 9 inch rear. This is due to the way that mass is distributed in the car. We have moved the weight bias forwards to give us traction for the front-engined, front-wheel drive. We’ve also moved the aero forwards so we’ve moved the capacity of the tyres forward to match the weight distribution. So the aero centre of pressure, the mass centre of gravity and the tyre capacity are all in harmony and that means we have bigger tyres at the front than the rear.” Q: Why doesn’t the Nissan GT-R LM NISMO look like the other manufacturer’s LM P1 cars? A: “The regulations have allowed us the freedom to create a significantly different looking car. Nissan are bold challengers who are prepared to innovate in order to get a high performance outcome so we’ve turned the whole concept of the conventional LM P1 car of 2014 on its head. The result is that our car looks different as the cockpit has been moved significantly rearwards to accommodate the engine at the front of the car.” While at the Retromobile last week I fell into conversation with an aeronautical engineer who expressed great interest in the Nissan project and the reasons for the unconventional, some would say revolutionary, approach. He observed that front wheel drive was now possible because of the advances in electronic controls which, we are told, will cure the torque-steer issue that has been a problem in the past. He also speculated that Michelin will be creating special tyres for the GT-R, given the dimensions and the level of power transmitted through them, that would seem to be certain. The Nissan GT-R LM NISMO will make its first public appearance at the Geneva Salon early next month and I will be reporting from there to confirm what it is like in the flesh. It is scheduled to run in the FIA World Endurance Championship Test Days at Le Castellet later in March and I will be attending that as well. The car's first race will then be at Silverstone in April, and yes, I will be there. I also plan to be at its other European races at Spa, Le Mans and Nürburgring. The battle between Audi, Nissan, Porsche and Toyota promises to be fantastic, I can hardly wait. *UPDATE 3/17/2015: The Nissan GT-R LM NISMO will be missing out on the pre-season test days as well as Silverstone and Spa. Plans are to be ready to race in June. More details at dailysportscar.com. Photos courtesy of and copyright NISMO and the author.
