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Meet Nissan’s 1250bhp, FWD Le Mans racer

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Meet Nissan’s 1250bhp, FWD Le Mans racer | Top Gear

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Meet Nissan’s 1250bhp, FWD Le Mans racer

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Meet Nissan’s 1250bhp, FWD Le Mans racer

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Meet Nissan’s 1250bhp, FWD Le Mans racer

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Meet Nissan’s 1250bhp, FWD Le Mans racer

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This freak of nature is the Nissan GT-R LM Nismo. Which means it's Nissan's Le Mans 24-hour contender, designed to take on the likes of Audi, Porsche and Toyota at La Sarthe this year. But it looks nothing like any of them...

Unveiled in an ad break during last night's American Superbowl (the New England Patriots beat the Seattle Seahawks 28-24, if you're into that sort of thing), Nissan has clearly taken a different tack with its interpretation of the rules.

So here's what we know: it's front-engined, using a 3.0-litre twin turbo V6 - not unlike the GT-R road car you might have seen on the TV show last night (if you didn't, do, it was a good ‘un). That engine is claimed to develop about 550bhp.

But it's front wheel drive. No, that's not a typo. Nissan's 2015 LMP1 car is front-wheel drive. Oh, and rear-wheel drive, too. Because while the fronts have to cope with 550bhp of internally combusted goodness, the rears have to manage somewhere in the region of 700 electrically generated horsepowers. So yes, that's a total of 1250bhp. Possibly more.

"Those are relatively conservative figures," admits Team Prinicipal and Technical Director Ben Bowlby. "We can't speak about our rivals but this is definitely an arms race and this is just Phase One."

The e-drive is a KERS system that harvests energy from the fronts under braking and deploys it out the back under acceleration. Other than that Nissan isn't saying too much about how the energy is stored or deployed. What is interesting is that the front tyres are much wider than the rears - 14 inches plays 9.

This, says Bowlby, is due to the manner of weight distribution around the car. Mass has been moved forward, improving traction at the front wheels.

You might remember Ben Bowlby as the man behind both the Deltawing and last year's Nissan Zeod Le Mans contender. The man is no stranger to radical thinking, which should ensure Nissan has put the cat among the pigeons with rival teams as they desperately try to work out whether Nissan has come up with some order of brilliance they'd never thought of.

"We have used the fact that there is no engine driving the rear wheels to allow us to have a through duct aerodynamic solution," explains Bowlby. "We duct the air that comes from underneath the front splitter - underneath the nose of the car - all the way through to come out above the diffuser at the back of the car.

"That's a solution that is very efficient in terms of low drag so rather than dump the air out sideways - you've seen all those louvres on the sides of the other LM P1 cars that let the air out from underneath the front of the car to the sides - we don't do that because it's a bit draggy so we duct it all the way back and dump it out over the top of the diffuser at the back."

However, Bowlby admits to the size of the challenge ahead. "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," he says.

Still, with1250bhp to push it along, it's not going to be slow, is it? 1,420bhp per tonne is, according to TopGear maths, a lot. More than an F1 car. And the racer is smaller than it looks, too - a mite shorter than a GT-R road car, near as dammit the same width, and a lot, lot lower. Just 103cm tall.

Quite what it'll be like to drive is another matter as well. Massively complex, we'd guess. Given that a Ford Focus ST putting shy of 250bhp through its front wheels can torque steer like a madman in the wet, be in no doubt Nissan's tech bods will be shoehorning lots of tech into the car to ensure circa 1250bhp doesn't just torpedo the GT-R LM straight into the gravel trap.

The only driver that has been announced so far is Marc Gene, the Spanish veteran who won Le Mans with Peugeot back in 2009. He brings much needed experience and a level head.

So after much speculation, the car is now out in the open - and suitably bewildering to look at. It's doing the full eight-round World Endurance Championship this year, which means it's first race will be at Silverstone on the 12th April. That promises to be an utterly absorbing spectacle.

Reckon it'll actually work?

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This freak of nature is the Nissan GT-R LM Nismo. Which means it's Nissan's Le Mans 24-hour contender, designed to take on the likes of Audi, Porsche and Toyota at La Sarthe this year. But it looks nothing like any of them...

Unveiled in an ad break during last night's American Superbowl (the New England Patriots beat the Seattle Seahawks 28-24, if you're into that sort of thing), Nissan has clearly taken a different tack with its interpretation of the rules.

So here's what we know: it's front-engined, using a 3.0-litre twin turbo V6 - not unlike the GT-R road car you might have seen on the TV show last night (if you didn't, do, it was a good ‘un). That engine is claimed to develop about 550bhp.

But it's front wheel drive. No, that's not a typo. Nissan's 2015 LMP1 car is front-wheel drive. Oh, and rear-wheel drive, too. Because while the fronts have to cope with 550bhp of internally combusted goodness, the rears have to manage somewhere in the region of 700 electrically generated horsepowers. So yes, that's a total of 1250bhp. Possibly more.

"Those are relatively conservative figures," admits Team Prinicipal and Technical Director Ben Bowlby. "We can't speak about our rivals but this is definitely an arms race and this is just Phase One."

The e-drive is a KERS system that harvests energy from the fronts under braking and deploys it out the back under acceleration. Other than that Nissan isn't saying too much about how the energy is stored or deployed. What is interesting is that the front tyres are much wider than the rears - 14 inches plays 9.

This, says Bowlby, is due to the manner of weight distribution around the car. Mass has been moved forward, improving traction at the front wheels.

You might remember Ben Bowlby as the man behind both the Deltawing and last year's Nissan Zeod Le Mans contender. The man is no stranger to radical thinking, which should ensure Nissan has put the cat among the pigeons with rival teams as they desperately try to work out whether Nissan has come up with some order of brilliance they'd never thought of.

"We have used the fact that there is no engine driving the rear wheels to allow us to have a through duct aerodynamic solution," explains Bowlby. "We duct the air that comes from underneath the front splitter - underneath the nose of the car - all the way through to come out above the diffuser at the back of the car.

"That's a solution that is very efficient in terms of low drag so rather than dump the air out sideways - you've seen all those louvres on the sides of the other LM P1 cars that let the air out from underneath the front of the car to the sides - we don't do that because it's a bit draggy so we duct it all the way back and dump it out over the top of the diffuser at the back."

However, Bowlby admits to the size of the challenge ahead. "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," he says.

Still, with1250bhp to push it along, it's not going to be slow, is it? 1,420bhp per tonne is, according to TopGear maths, a lot. More than an F1 car. And the racer is smaller than it looks, too - a mite shorter than a GT-R road car, near as dammit the same width, and a lot, lot lower. Just 103cm tall.

Quite what it'll be like to drive is another matter as well. Massively complex, we'd guess. Given that a Ford Focus ST putting shy of 250bhp through its front wheels can torque steer like a madman in the wet, be in no doubt Nissan's tech bods will be shoehorning lots of tech into the car to ensure circa 1250bhp doesn't just torpedo the GT-R LM straight into the gravel trap.

The only driver that has been announced so far is Marc Gene, the Spanish veteran who won Le Mans with Peugeot back in 2009. He brings much needed experience and a level head.

So after much speculation, the car is now out in the open - and suitably bewildering to look at. It's doing the full eight-round World Endurance Championship this year, which means it's first race will be at Silverstone on the 12th April. That promises to be an utterly absorbing spectacle.

Reckon it'll actually work?

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Yes, Nismo’s LMP1 contender is this mind-boggling hybrid. Can it end Audi’s 24-hour dominance?