There’s an old saying: “If at first you don’t succeed, quit and give up entirely.” The folks at Nismo do not believe in this philosophy! Despite struggling at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the bonkers front-wheel drive Nissan GT-R LM Nismo will return to the FIA World Endurance Championship next year — but not any sooner.
The company confirmed the car will sit out the last three races of the 2015 season while they sort out its technical issues, but they also say they think they’re on the right track. Nissan says “multiple changes” have been made to the car since its Le Mans, where just one of the three cars finished — slowly.
The team just completed two days of testing at Circuit of the Americas in Texas, where they said it was significantly faster and without reliability issues. They did, however, note that the test car was running without KERS, which was one of their major drawbacks at Le Mans.
In addition to the work being done, Nissan’s Director of Vehicle Project Management in Mexico, a guy named Michael Carcamo, has been tapped to be Team Principal so Ben Bowlby can focus on making this thing faster as technical director. Here’s what he said in a news release:
“The challenge that we took on was a monumental task. We have to learn all of the dynamics of this new vehicle and all the performance tuning so it takes a long time to find the sweet spot of performance. We recognise that challenge and we’ve added the resources and infrastructure behind the programme to try and bring it to that next level.”
Good, I say. Good! I like this crazy experiment from Nissan, and I like how it embodies the try-anything spirit of the WEC — even if its first-ever outing didn’t go so great. I hope they make it work and it’s around for a long time.
Contact the author at patrick@jalopnik.com.