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During the Super Bowl, Nissan dropped a bomb. No, it wasn’t that instead of sending the entire losing team to Disney World, they’d be sending them to Detroit to work in hard labor camps. Rather, Nissan debuted an ad spot that won’t soon be forgotten. It featured a driver, a new Maxima, and a very interesting Le Mans race car.
This is the new Nissan GT-R LM Nismo, and it will compete for overall victory at Le Mans in the LM P1 class. This means it will be up against Audis and Toyotas for the creme de la creme of the high-end racing series. But unlike the Audis and Toyotas in its class, the Nissan LM will implement an interesting strategy.
Along with a 3.0-liter twin-turbo V6 coupled to a kinetic energy recovery system, the Nissan will use front-wheel drive. That’s unheard of in any racing series. Hopefully those front wheels can handle that 1,250-horsepower and that 1,940 lb curb weight.
As it stands, it’s hard enough for teams to manage the RWD and AWD cars that already dominate the field, while Nissan, on the other hand, is attempting to use a hybrid system that renders it actually drivable to counter bone-shattering torque steer.
While the gasoline powered engine will power just the front wheels, the separate hybrid kinetic drivetrain will power the rears in “certain situations.” And while that may sound like an AWD system, it is still technically FWD, according to Nissan. It really sounds like a marketing ploy if you ask me.
But the worrying part of all this seems to be that the GT-R LM previews what could be the future GT-R road car.
Could you imagine a hybrid, FWD Nissan GT-R? You definitely have our attention Nissan, though, here’s to hoping it comes out better than it sounds.
We’ll be checking out it next week when it takes center stage at the Chicago Auto Show.
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