THE LONG HARD ROAD TO LE MANS
TopGear has been granted world-exclusive access to Nissan’s radical new Le Mans car. With 1,250bhp and front-wheel drive, will it be ambitious but...
It’s 6am, in the breakfast room of a nondescript Hampton Inn somewhere in a nondescript part of lower, right-hand-down-a-bit America. The friendly middle-aged lady preparing the grits is curious. “Are you with those racing guys?” I tell her I am.
“What you doing down here?” Trying to make a new racing car work, I explain. I decide to leave out the complexities of the fywheel hybrid system and front-wheel drive at this stage. I don’t want her to forget her grits.
“But there are so many of you.” There are, I admit. Last night, I counted 20 engineers at the debrief and about another 10 mechanics.
“So how many cars you got down there?” Just the one, I say. Incomprehension roots her to the spot. After a while, she shakes her head and wanders of. To be fair, I’ve spent quite a lot of my time out here looking puzzled and shaking my head as well. This is Nissan’s GT-R LM, it’s going to Le Mans this year and it’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.
I have seen it before. The day before I few out here, the engine-less show car was in our TV studio. It wasn’t meant to be; it was meant to be fying to America, but it had gone to Heathrow and the cargo frm had suddenly declared it to be three inches too long for the plane’s loading pallet. Although this was a borderline catastrophe for Nissan, it allowed us to pinch it for half a day and have a good poke around. This left me with more questions than answers.
But now I can get them answered. All of them. Because Nissan’s strategy with this project is unique. No secrecy. They’re going to share everything. This is practically unheard of. Late last year, I drove BMW’s DTM car, and we weren’t allowed to take pictures of the lower half of the cockpit, the inside of the doors or any low-down shots at the rear.
But here photographer Greg Pajo is allowed to point his Canon wherever he chooses. And I’m allowed to ask questions, to which I get answers so detailed my brain is in danger of leaking out of my ears. So, frst question: “In June, three of these GT-R LM’s will line up on the grid at Le Mans alongside the Audis, Porsches and Toyotas, in the fagship LMP1 class. So why, how, does this not look anything like the others?”
“Well, if it looked like the others, it would probably perform close to the same. We’re coming to Le Mans and we want to win, so we took an approach where we’ve innovated, looked at the rules to see if we can’t get ourselves a quick way to the front.”
The man speaking is Ben Bowlby, team principal and technical director of Nissan’s LMP1 project. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because he’s also the chap responsible for the DeltaWing and Nissan Zeod. It’s fair to say he has previous in the wackier reaches of sports-car racing.
“We looked at the regulations, and we realised there was very efcient downforce available at the front of the car, while the rear was very heavily regulated. The rear wing is locked into a very small box, it’s not a very efcient shape, and the difuser is almost specifed – the height, width, where the fences can go and so on.
“NISSAN’S STRATEGY WITH THIS PROJECT
IS UNIQUE: NO SECRECY”
“So if you want to make maximum use of the available downforce at the front, you have to change other parameters – you have to fnd harmony in the handling and balance of the car – and that means getting the weight distribution, aerodynamic distribution and tyre distribution all aligned. If we want to use the big downforce that’s available at the front, then we’re going to use bigger tyres at the front, move all the mass forwards and, as it turns out, we’re also going to drive the front wheels.”
That’s right, this is a front-wheel-drive Le Mans car. A front-driver has never won Le Mans. In fact, the last time one competed was well over 50 years ago. The aim, as you may have already heard, is that the GT-R LM will be four-wheel-drive, with the internal combustion engine driving the fronts and the hybrid system (which we’ll discuss later), the rears. At the moment, though, it’s pure front-drive. With around 1,250bhp. Really.
But before we get on to the drivetrain, we need to clear up the aerodynamics. Back to Bowlby: “What’s very interesting is that the engine and gearbox are narrow, whereas the tub, the driver survival cell, by regulation has to be quite wide, so aerodynamically we don’t want a big blockage directly behind the splitter. So it’s a big advantage to have the engine up front and have the clean V-shaped hull of the bottom of the V6 to give us the best possible airfow exiting behind the splitter. And that’s when it all starts to fall into place…”
I’m clinging on by my fngernails at this stage, but the advantage of this layout is that instead of having to get rid of the air immediately and channel it out aft of the front wheels (as its rivals have to with their wide tubs at the front), Nissan is able to steer this air into huge tunnels that sweep back from the sides of the engine all the way to the back of the car. And I mean huge. Bowlby shows me a picture of one of his mechanics entirely inserted head-frst into one of the tunnels, boots and all. “The tunnels are the waste management system”, Bowlby continues, “they basically do the work of a giant vacuum cleaner, sucking up the used air and blowing it out the back, straight over the top of the difuser and into the low-pressure area behind the car. What’s in the tunnel doesn’t act to make downforce, but does extract the fow incredibly efciently and reduce the wake behind the car.”
That, in a nutshell, is the aero justifcation for the Nismo’s, um, challenging looks. It’s not pretty. The packaging, however, is remarkable. The vast bonnet is taken of, and underneath is a seething mass of wires. It looks like a snake pit. Where the hell is the bulky 3.0-litre V6? All I can see are the turbos.
The direct-injection V6 was bespoke designed to ft the space that Bowlby had left for it. It develops about 550bhp and only drives the front wheels through a fve-speed sequential gearbox and a pair of driveshafts thicker than scafolding poles. Bowlby is very happy with the result: “It makes its power incredibly efciently – it’s almost diesel-like in terms of the thermal efciency of the engine.”
But the engine we understand. It’s not far of the same layout and power as the one in a GT-R road car.
“UNDER THE VAST BONNET, IT LOOKS LIKE A SNAKE PIT”