Difficult beginnings for Nissan at Le Mans
For its first official appearance, Nissan experienced significant difficulties on the Le Mans circuit as the three cars are more than twenty seconds behind the leading cars.
When Nissan announced its return to LMP1, the ambitions were very high as the executives stated that they had only one goal: victory. To achieve this, the Japanese executives made a completely different technological choice compared to the three other official teams, Toyota, Audi, and Porsche, as the three cars entered are front-wheel drives.
Nevertheless, the development program for this new technology has been delayed, which has already forced the team to forgo the first two events of the championship, at Silverstone and Spa-Francorchamps, in order to maximize its chances of performing well at the most important race on the calendar: the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Everyone was therefore waiting to see the first direct confrontation with its competitors to gauge the team’s performance level for its debut. These didn’t live up to expectations, even though it’s acknowledged that they were complicated by the changing weather conditions.
During the first morning session, the highest-ranked car, driven by former F1 driver Max Chilton, was 21 seconds behind the Porsche No. 18. Such a performance placed it in the middle of the LMP2 pack. The other two cars were even further behind, with No. 22 trailing by 27 seconds and No. 21 by 29 seconds. In the afternoon, the situation did not improve as No. 22 was now 29 seconds behind the best in the category. No. 21 was 37 seconds behind, less than five-tenths ahead of the first of the GT Pro!
However, Darren Cox, the president of Nissan Motorsport, believes that the situation will be better in two weeks. According to him, his cars will be far ahead of the LMP2, even though the team does not have qualifying tires due to a lack of time. He told *Autosport*: « What time did they do last year? 3 minutes 37? We will be far ahead of that. There has been a lot of speculation on social media, but they are completely wrong. Our simulations tell us what time we can achieve, but it will not be our target, and we are not going to disclose what it is. »
