While there's never much talk or coverage around here about international racing, I've been following preparations for Nissan's full-out return to world endurance racing with the NISMO GT-R LM. This radical car has been touted as an innovative and radical challenge to the more conventional prototypes from Audi, Porsche and Toyota.
Nissan Europe has funded a massive three car entry to the race, but despite a lot of testing (mostly in the U.S. ironically) the car lacks pace. After three qualifying sessions, the NISMO GT-R LMs were almost 20 seconds off the top qualifying times! The cars qualified 12th, 13th and 14th in LMP1 and will be forced to start from the rear of the field after failing to make the 110% rule (must qualify within 110% of the fastest car's time) in effect at LeMans.
Now LeMans is the supreme test of endurance, and there's a chance one of the three Nissan entries will finish higher than their lowly starting positions. But with that big a disparity in lap times, there's also a chance the Nissan entries will be embarrassed in the race. Nissan is putting a brave face before the start of the race on Saturday, but I wonder what is going on internally? After all, Nissan is used to running up front (innovation or not) and has been close to winning LeMans in the past. A multi-million dollar race effort is expected to produce results, and I doubt this is what Nissan had in mind. What does everybody else think?
Here's the latest press release on the Friday (6/12/15) before the start of the race:
Nissan’s Le Mans racer continues to improve - Nissan Online Newsroom