With Porsche now returning to the challenging world of endurance racing with their 919 Hybrid LMP1 racer, Nissan stuns the world with the announcement of their top-tier racer. Dubbed as the GT-R LM NISMO LMP1, the race car will join the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2016, but the piece of news that interests us now is that the development of their new GT-R will be closely linked with the Le Mans car project.
Of course, the GT-R LM NISMO LMP1 will not be based on their road-going GT-R, but there will definitely be technology transfer between those two.
“We very clearly want to link technological linkages between future evolutions of the GT-R and evolutions of what we do in LMP1,” said Nissan executive vice president Andy Palmer to Autocar. And one of the key links between the two cars highlighted by Palmer is the hybrid technology. This could be as diverse as powertrain technology, energy storage and recovery, and electric motor-based traction control.
It is pretty apparent that the next GT-R will feature hybrid technology, especially after Nissan had filed a trademark for the “R-Hybrid” name and Palmer himself gave a confirmation of the matter. Nissan will be working together with the technology arm of the Williams Formula One team, Williams Advanced Engineering to develop its future performance cars. Williams Advanced Engineering was involved in helping Audi develop hybrid technology for their successful R18 e-tron Quattro LMP1.
