Bad news from Nissan’s factory racing division: The team announced this morning that it will not enter the GT-R LM NISMO in the 2016 season of FIA World Endurance Championship racing.
The GT-R LM NISMO was an outrageous, unconventional entry in the LMP1 category when it competed in the 2015 WEC season. The 3.0-liter twin-turbo V-6 was mounted in the front, driving the front wheels?in both cases the opposite of the convention in LMP1. That, plus a heavily front-biased aerodynamic setup showed that Nissan’s race engineers thought they’d hit on a secret advantage that would depose five-in-a-row Le Mans winner Audi.
Of course, that’s not how it worked out. Porsche took the overall LMP1 victory in this year’s running at the Circuit de la Sarthe, while Nissan’s LMP1 entries ran so far back from the leaders, they were tangling with LMP2 and GTE-Pro racers instead of the Porsche and Audi front-runners. Only one of the three NISMOs even crossed the finish line.
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Faced with that poor outing, Nissan has decided to withdraw from the 2016 season. “Nissan entered LMP1 in the 2015 season with an innovative, new, and bold concept, with the ambition to compete at the front of the field,” the team says in its statement. “The teams ...