UPDATE: Nissan First Tests: Nissan announces LMP1 for 2015 [wecfia]

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UPDATE: Nissan First Tests: Nissan announces LMP1 for 2015 [wecfia] Feb 2, 2015 8:08:39 GMT -6

Quote

Post by n7thGear™ on Feb 2, 2015 8:08:39 GMT -6

UPDATED: SEE BELOW
The Nissan GT-R LM is going to have its first rollout in Arizona this week.

The newest edition to WEC's growing LMP1 lineup will be on hand at Nissan’s North American technical center for testing today and tomorrow.

At their disposal, Nissan has a 5.7 mile high-speed oval. Along with the massive flat oval, there are also four road courses available. The complex is 3,050-acres, located in a secluded area, just outside the general population in Stanfield, Arizona. More details regarding this shakedown are unknown.

We can expect driver announcements coming shortly with Heidfeld, Pla, and Sarrazin all expected to migrate there. The rest of their lineup will most likely be filled by their GT Academy drivers. The team also plans to run a third car in the 2015 24 Hours of Le Mans.

The Nissan LMP1's first public test will most likely be taking place at Sebring, immediately following the car's launch in Florida on the eighth of December.

The new Nissan LMP1 factory program has ventured out from its t
Temporary base in Southern California to conduct its first test at the Nissan Technical Center in Stanfield, Ariz.

The nature of the test is unknown, although with a secluded 5.7-mile facility at its disposal, a variety of options would exist for the team while running without fear of onlookers exposing their new-for-2015 Le Mans challenger penned by designer Ben Bowlby.

Everything from basic systems tests, hydraulic tests and straightline running would be normal testing items for the Nissan GT-R LM NISMO chassis.

A Nissan Motorsport spokesman was non-committal when asked about the test: "The LMP1 program continues to run to schedule. Our official launch and all associated information will be communicated in due course but certainly not before the New Year."

Nissan Planning to Run Three LMP1 Cars at Le Mans in 2015

Details on Nissan’s new factory LMP1 program are emerging, including plans of running a third car at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, as well as the identity of its team manager.

Multiple sources have confirmed to Sportscar365 that the Japanese manufacturer has brought on board IndyCar veteran Chris Mower to lead efforts for the Nissan GT-R LM NISMO program.

Mower, who is coming off a six-year stint with Panther Racing as its general manager, is understood to have started working with Nissan late last year at the manufacturer’s California-based facility.

Darren Cox, NISMO Global Head of Brand, Marketing & Sales, would not confirm Mower’s hiring but said that “Chris would be a good choice for sure.”

Cox, however, revealed that it’s their hope to enter a third car at Le Mans next year, alongside the already confirmed two full-season FIA World Endurance Championship entries.

It would result in the need of ten drivers, including one reserve driver, and Cox admitted they are looking at existing pilots from the LMP1 ranks to lead their roster.

“I think you’ve got to have existing LMP1 drivers in the lineup,” Cox told Sportscar365. “You can’t go with a bunch of rookies. We’re not going to have a go and look at someone who’s gone and done [GP2] but hasn’t done any prototype racing.

“There’s guys that have done single-seaters that have done prototype racing [experience] and they’re the first guys we’ll talk to after the current P1 drivers.”

As for ensuring space in the lineup for GT Academy drivers, Cox said there are no guarantees and their selection will be purely based on performance.

“[The GT Academy] drivers have to do it on ability, not the fact that I like them,” he said. “It’s the exactly the same on Japanese drivers, GT Academy drivers or anyone we got in our current lineup.

“We will pick the best 10 drivers that we can find.”

Additionally, Cox denied rumors that the GT-R LM NISMO is a front-engined prototype, with details on the powertrain not likely to be revealed until early next year.

“We believe that there’s still a significant amount of innovation left in the rules,” he said. “You will be surprised on what we do on the powertrain.”

The first car, believed to be under construction at Dan Gurney’s AAR workshop in Santa Ana, Calif., is expected to begin testing in October.

Cox confirmed the GT-R LM NISMO’s first four scheduled tests will be conducted in private, at undisclosed Nissan testing facilities, which are located around the world.

Spy Shots at COTA

Last Edit: Feb 2, 2015 8:47:36 GMT -6 by n7thGear™

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n7thGear™
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UPDATE: Nissan First Tests: Nissan announces LMP1 for 2015 [wecfia] Feb 2, 2015 8:09:30 GMT -6

Quote

Post by n7thGear™ on Feb 2, 2015 8:09:30 GMT -6

Finally, after many months of speculation and prototype renderings, she's here:

Introducing the GT-R LM NISMO - This is the Nissan NISMO entry to the 2015 Le Mans 24 Hour race, in the LM P1 category.

The GT-R LM NISMO is a front-engined, front wheel drive car that is powered by a V6 3-litre twin turbo petrol engine and a kinetic energy recovery system- It is the ultimate GT-R.

NISSAN REVEALS LE MANS CHALLENGER DURING SUPER BOWL

First glimpse of race-ready Nissan GT-R LM NISMO during Super Bowl XLIX
Innovative new LM P1 racing car is like no other Le Mans car
TAG Heuer, Motul and Michelin revealed as Nissan LM P1 partners

Nissan today declared itself ready to take on the world's best sports car manufacturers after revealing a glimpse of its Le Mans challenger - the Nissan GT-R LM NISMO - during the commercial break for Super Bowl XLIX.

Last year's Super Bowl was the most watched television programme in US television history with over 110 million viewers. The 2015 game was therefore the perfect opportunity for Nissan's “With Dad” commercial (view at to air for the first time, revealing the much-anticipated Nissan GT-R LM NISMO, the car that will take on the best in the world in the race to glory at the Le Mans 24 Hours.

In a bold move, the Japanese manufacturer has interpreted the sport's technical regulations in an innovative way, producing a front-engined, front wheel drive car that is powered by a V6 3-litre twin turbo petrol engine and a kinetic energy recovery system.

“It gave us great pride to reveal the Nissan GT-R LM NISMO during the Superbowl,” said Roel de Vries, Global Head of Marketing and Brand Strategy at Nissan. “The combination of the Super Bowl and the Le Mans 24 Hours - two of the most watched sporting events in the world - presented us with a unique opportunity to showcase our most ambitious motorsport programme in recent times.

“The GT-R is our flagship road car,” he continued. “This, the ultimate GT-R, continues a sporting bloodline that goes back three decades with NISMO, the motorsport and performance arm of Nissan. Le Mans drives innovation so success on the track will lead to greater innovation in our road car range. We are the new kids at Le Mans; our opponents are the best in the world but we are ready.”

The new car will contest the LM P1 class of the FIA World Endurance Championship, the highest category in world sports car racing. Starting at Silverstone, UK on 12 April the series travels around the world to Spa in Belgium, onto the Le Mans 24 Hours and Germany's Nurburgring, before going global with races in the US, Japan, China and the Middle East.

The FIA World Endurance Championship is the ultimate proving ground for automotive companies as technological gains on the track can carry through to road cars. Racing car engineers are facing the same challenges as road car engineers as the spotlight falls on energy efficiency. With more technical freedom than Formula 1, the LM P1 engineers have ample opportunity to innovate.

“This is innovation that excites,” said Shoichi Miyatani, President of NISMO. “Sustainability is at the top of our agenda and the technical regulations for Le Mans give us the freedom to pursue new ideas in this area. Our record at Le Mans is third place overall so we have unfinished business there. We want to win and we have the knowledge to do that - for our customers, our employees and our fans. The competition is exceptionally strong and we are excited by the challenge.”

“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,” explained Darren Cox, Global Head of Brand, Marketing & Sales, NISMO. “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.”

The intensive test program for the Nissan GT-R LM NISMO that began in Arizona last year continues this week at the Circuit of the Americas in Texas, where the team is making the most of the warmer climate of the Southern US. Nissan's LM P1 drivers will be revealed soon.

NEW LM P1 PARTNERSHIPS REVEALED

Nissan also announced three multi-year partnerships that will feature prominently in its LM P1 programme.

Swiss watchmaker TAG Heuer is the Official Watch Partner and Official Timekeeping Partner. The LM P1 drivers will all wear TAG Heuer watches and the partnership will be activated globally by both parties, with several exciting developments to be announced in the coming months.

Motul is the Official Lubricants Partner for the programme, working closely with NISMO's engine department to develop high-performance products to enhance competitiveness and efficiency. Motul has enjoyed a long-standing relationship with NISMO over the past two decades and this natural expansion into the LM P1 programme comes soon after the SUPER GT Championship victory for the iconic #23 MOTUL AUTECH GT-R.

The LM P1 programme will use tyres supplied by Michelin. The French manufacturer has developed tyres especially for the Nissan GT-R LM NISMO and been an integral part of the car's extensive test programme.
Click images above to see larger versions.

NISSAN GT-R LM NISMO Technical Specification

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 housed ahead and beneath driverfs 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
Tyres Michelin
31/71-16 front, 20/71-16 rear radials
Electrical 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 4.645m
Width 1.9m
Height 1.03m
Minimum weight 880kg
Full tank capacity 68 litre

Ben Bowlby gives insight into the DNA of Nissan's GT-R LM NISMO.

A truly global effort, the GT-R has been created by a team of carefully selected experts in Japan, the US and Europe. Unlike other LM P1 cars, the GT-R’s V6 3-litre twin turbo petrol engine sits in the front of the front-wheel-drive car, while the hybrid power is harvested from the front driveline to augment acceleration.

The man best placed to describe Nissan’s innovative LM P1 car is Ben Bowlby, Nissan’s LM P1 Team Principal and Technical Director.
Can you explain the how the different power sources work on the GT-R?

“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.”
Is the GT-R a front-wheel-drive car?

“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.”

If the GT-R has all this power, will it be faster than the other manufacturer’s LM P1 cars?
“The LM P1 regulations for manufacturers have four hybrid powertrain options, defined by how much hybrid energy is released from the ERS 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."
What about the tyres? The rears look narrower than the front tyres!

“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.”
Why doesn’t the Nissan GT-R LM NISMO look like the other manufacturer’s LM P1 cars?

“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.”

QUESTION: Is the GT-R a front-wheel-drive car?

BOWLBY: 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.

QUESTION: If the GT-R has all this power, will it be faster than the other manufacturer’s LM P1 cars?

BOWLBY: The LM P1 regulations for manufacturers have four hybrid powertrain options, defined by how much hybrid energy is released from the ERS 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.

Rhys

Drivers will do well to see the apex!
mto

Have to agree with you there. Also see a lot of clumsy overtaking moves on slower cars. Sometimes engineers/designers can be a bit too clever for their own (and drivers) good.
www.goodpublicity.com.au/ Good Publicity

It sounds like the result of a corporate product planning committee meeting.

There’ll be massive torque-steer when the electrical charge kicks in mid-corner, and driving it on a wet track will be diabolical.

Back to the drawing board.
FreddyAm

The car will be 4wd just like the other LMP1’s. The only difference is the ICE unit puts it’s power to the front wheels,while the even more powerful Kers unit will put most of its power to the rear.
FreddyAm

The driving position will be little different to an Aston Martin, Corvette or Viper. In this cars the drivers sit on the floor, positioned where the rear seats would be.