Saying that Nissan has "unfinished business" at Circuit de la Sarthe, NISMO chief Shochi Miyatani announced that Nissan will enter a new car in the 2015 24 Hours of Le Mans, saying "We have a chance to target victory with the Nissan GT-R LM NISMO."
Yes, you read that corretly. Nissan will use the nameplate of its performance flagship, GT-R, on a new LMP1 prototype in a bid to defeat Porsche, Audi, and Toyota and grab the overall Le Mans win next year. NISMO marketing boss Darren Cox says that the latest ACO rules make the timing right. "The new focus on energy efficiency for 2014 and beyond means the engineering challenges have real relevance to the challenges our engineers face on road-car projects."
Nissan has demonstrated that it's unafraid to play with different approaches at Le Mans via its Garage 56 experimental entries: the DeltaWing in 2012 and this year with the ZEOD RC, with which the company hopes to complete a full lap under electric power.
The GT-R LM NISMO itself remain under wraps (literally, as you can see in the images here) for now. Cox says that testing will begin in October. Nissan says that resources will be pulled from all over the world, making the project a true global effort, and that we'll see some "familiar faces" as the effort comes together.
Most importantly, Nissan isn't taking this lightly. Planning chief and executive vice president Andy Palmer puts it succinctly, "We want to win. We want to be the bad boys."
