Nissan LMP1 Discussion

[Deleted]

Good to have someone straight from the Nissan management board here telling strictly what has happened by de facto and what has not... ... ...

Distorted: you're right, though it was doing okay in ALMS Road America 2013, leading the race even for while, but given that Dyson was run & driven by amateurs and Pickett screwed up in pits and there were no others and it rained, it wasn't THAT special. On top on the things already discussed.

[MoMedic9019]

Originally Posted by brakedisc

Since I know nothing and you know it all perhaps you could tell us what Adrian Newey told the Nissan board? I bet he took one look at it and said............................................File B for bucket.

Newey wasn't involved. It was pure rumour.

This car was designed to work with the ToroTrak system, nobody elses. It was too hard to adapt a new system, and still make gains when that was also underperforming as it was adapted from F1.

The car would have been nearly 1-1/2 years behind at LeMans in 2016, essentially two years behind development schedule by 2017. WIth new rules and requirements forcing a whole new car by 2017... it becomes pretty obvious as to why it was binned and not given a further chance.

When you understand that 90+% of the problems were caused by a single third party who continually promised things, and delivered none... it's easy to see where it all went wrong.

I was always supportive of ToroTrak as they do have working systems, but cannot build one to work in motorsports to save their life.

[FormulaFox]

Originally Posted by DistortedSmile

That never happened, midpack LMP2 speed at best when it was run by Nissan, typically slower than PC when run by Panoz.

While run by Nissan, it was running with the ACO's speed restrictions.

While running with Elan, your claims are false. Though it struggled to qualify at speed early in the season, for the most part the car merely FINISHED behind PC cars because it has been less than reliable under Panoz' leadership(shoestring budgets are not conducive to reliable racecars), it was regularly posting lap times on the same level as the P1 cars at the time. It even LED THE RACE at Road America on actual speed before falling back as engine trouble developed.

Citation needed, the reports that it was doing P1L speeds at Cota =/= laptimes.

The citations are all over this very thread.

[FormulaFox]

Originally Posted by brakedisc

Since I know nothing and you know it all perhaps you could tell us what Adrian Newey told the Nissan board? I bet he took one look at it and said............................................File B for bucket.

As MoMedic has noted, Newey never actually gave any input.

Nissan has clarified why they shelved the project and in doing so have confirmed the gains the car had made. The reason for the cancellation was that to implement the improvements they had to build a whole new car from scratch, which they don't have time to do before the new WEC season without rushing it - and rushing the project is exactly what led to the problems in the first place.

They have even left open the possibility that the project could be restarted. That should tell you something.

[carbsmith]

You conveniently omit the fact the DeltaWing also finished behind two PC cars and was 5.5 seconds slower than the winning HPD's fastest lap in that Road America race. All of the P2 HPD's set quicker laps too. In fact, it never did a fastest lap better than the P2s all year and was lucky to be on PC pace most of the time.

But yeah go figure a low powered car is effective in heavy wet conditions, who knew. Guess that means the 911 RSR is faster than a P2 car too.

[Rcz]

The DW is a good fun concept, but being under Panoz has destroyed the cars credibility. Race cars under Panoz have sucked. And I predict there will be no DW GT car.

As the Nissan P1 car, we will never ever know it true real speed

[FormulaFox]

Originally Posted by carbsmith

You conveniently omit the fact the DeltaWing also finished behind two PC cars

Yes, because it suffered ENGINE TROUBLE later in the race. Finishing positions don't tell the whole story.

and was 5.5 seconds slower than the winning HPD's fastest lap in that Road America race. All of the P2 HPD's set quicker laps too.

And...? Oh, wow, the car's fastest single lap was slower. What a terrible thing to happen.

Fastest laps only really make a difference in qualifying - it can be an indicator of a car's ultimate performance capabilities, but tells one nothing about how an overall race went. In the race it's all about speed over the entire fuel run, which the DW was able to match until it hit the reliability issues that have been it's Achilles Heel ever since Elan took over the project.

Let me put it like this... The Nissan GT-R LM Nismo was successful in exactly ONE area when it hit Le Mans: Top speed. A lot of people(read: Fools) look at top speed as an ultimate indicator of what a car can do. IF that were true, the Nissan would've been a contender for the win at Le Mans this year. As we all know, they weren't due to a variety of other issues.

The DW is in a similar boat; It can't do a single flying lap as quickly as other cars, but it's performance over a run is generally identical to the other P cars. It's top speed on a straight usually exceeds that of the other P cars, and it has in fact been consistently THE fastest car on the Daytona banking since the merger.

The Delta Wing has proven it is a sound concept that could win races... IF someone would actually sink some money into improving it. That's the key thing the haters ignore - nobody is saying the Delta Wing as we've seen it is a successful racecar.

We consider it a successful CONCEPT that could actually become a successful racecar with sufficient backing.

But yeah go figure a low powered car is effective in heavy wet conditions, who knew.

Road America 2013(and Sebring 2014 - but that one's not actually worth crediting) was dry as a bone.

Now can we PLEASE move on? We've been off-topic more than long enough.

[FormulaFox]

Originally Posted by Rcz

The DW is a good fun concept, but being under Panoz has destroyed the cars credibility. Race cars under Panoz have sucked. And I predict there will be no DW GT car.

It speaks volumes that the last prototype Panoz built, the LMP07, did better after it's development was terminated and the chassis sold to another company than it did under their development.

Panoz can make a good GT car out of a decent roadgoing sportscar(see the Esperante - never lit the world on fire, but did plenty well), but that's about it. They are unlikely to ever again achieve the (admittedly limited, but still significant) success they had with the LMP1 Roadster-S.

[chernaudi]

The Panoz LMP1 Roadster--the Ford small-block powered one--was the only car to really pose any serious threats to Audi in the ALMS in the old R8 days on a consistent basis. But even then, that only really applied to 3 hour or shorter sprint races, and never at Le Mans.

Since those days, Don Panoz went from the ALMS' front man and creative, innovative series owner to doing like so many others, trying to reap the maximum bang for a few bucks. Don stopped investing seriously in the ALMS after '06 after one of his GT2 cars won it's class at Le Mans, and got OEMs to dump money into the series. That was all well and fine, until Audi and Porsche got tired of heavily subsidizing the series for the relatively little ROI they were getting compared to the LM24, not to mention that Audi won everything there was to win in LMP1 and the same for Porsche in LMP2.

I'll agree that the DeltaWing did what it was supposed to do. It helped prove aero and chassis design concepts were workable and could prove useful in the future of LMP design depending on what the rules makers come up with.

But at the same time, some of these pro or con stances do have to be tempered by facts. The car was running outside of official ACO LMP1 and LMP2 rules as a Garage 56 effort. So it wasn't even officially classified by the ACO in the running order (same happened with Dyson when one of their Mazda-Lolas was converted to run off of isobutanl fuel at PLM in '09) aside from being an invite entry.

And yes, it's performance was capped by the ACO, namely to keep it from interfering/intermingling with LMP2 cars, yet still be fast enough to out run the GT cars. That there does show some angst by the LMP2 contingent back then about being overshadowed by a car built in large part as a press piece, in large part as a non-LMP1 rolling laboratory, and in part too due to it being designed outside of any LMP class technical regs as they existed from 2012 to present.

Now, to step away from the DW and 2012 to the present day, the Nissan GT-R LMP1 was kind of the inverse of the DW concept. You can't fault or deny that the car was very interesting from a design standpoint, but personally, I had my doubts about it's performance potential as it was originally designed. Granted, that was because of some of the stuff that was normally found on mid-engined/predominantly RWD LMP1 cars.

One thing that befuddled me from the beginning was there seemed to be no externally visible way for the GT-R LMP1 to manage air flow out of the front diffuser as it passed the front wheel wells. All the other LMP1 and LMP2 cars had something of that nature, namely the separate pontoon fender extensions. And even the Panoz LMP1 Roadster had a couple of variations on that theme with vents behind the front wheels (not pontoon fenders in the normal sense of the word, but Toyota GT-One/2000 Audi R8 vents behind the front wheels).

I know that all the air coming from the front of the car was supposed to be vented out the rear though the ducting that terminated above the rear diffuser, but the '09 Audi R15 and the Aston Martin AMR-One did show that the concept, though having a lot of theoretical merit, wasn't entirely practical in actual practice. And that's in spite of the R15 winning Sebring and dominating PLM in 2009. For low drag, though, it's not entirely what you want.

IMO, the car to my eyes seemed under-designed in some areas, and over-designed in others. And both things IMO killed the car as a practical racing machine. The under-designed parts robbed it of performance, and the over-designed stuff just added too many complications.

One can say what they want about LMP1 and LMP2 cars having similar design features and themes, but the simple answer to that is that those items and themes work and have development potential.

I myself hoped that the Nissan wasn't a dud because it would've been neat to see something different and how it could do if it was up to snuff. But the car was never up to snuff from day one. Though Nissan had a budget that private teams in LMP1 would kill for, it was minuscule compared to even TMG's budget, let alone what Audi and Porsche had available. Even worse, Nissan tried to fast-track the whole program. Audi, Porsche and Toyota had a couple of years to work on their LMP1 cars to get them to where they wanted them, and Audi have worked on their 2016 spec R18 since near the start of the 2014 WEC season, and was began in parallel to what Audi would do with the 2015 R18.

When you need time, money and manpower to make a "conventional" LMP1H car to work of the nature that Audi, Porsche and TMG spent on their stuff, that grows more when you throw in unproven and unconventional techniques into the mix.

IMO, Nissan tried to simply fast-track their design with little in the way of resources to make it workable in the first place. And I think that they finally realized that their car was a dead end due to compromises to make it work for 2016. It failed crash testing after they modified the design (which obviously entails more mods to make it legal to ACO/FIA crash regs), and the hybrid parts wouldn't be ready for stage 1 until Feb, with the possibility that the whole shebang wouldn't be ready until after Le Mans.

Sensibly, the question of "what's the point" came about. Granted, I definitely feel as someone who got layed off from a job due to sudden budget cuts that Nissan could've handled the release of most of their employees differently (such as announce it earlier or give them a longer lead time before the lay offs started), but that's just sadly symptomatic of the bundle of problems that the Nissan LMP1 program became.

[MoMedic9019]

Originally Posted by carbsmith

You conveniently omit the fact the DeltaWing also finished behind two PC cars and was 5.5 seconds slower than the winning HPD's fastest lap in that Road America race. All of the P2 HPD's set quicker laps too. In fact, it never did a fastest lap better than the P2s all year and was lucky to be on PC pace most of the time.

But yeah go figure a low powered car is effective in heavy wet conditions, who knew. Guess that means the 911 RSR is faster than a P2 car too.

The Panoz DW is different than the actual DW.... just for a talking point.

[Rcz]

I have to say, there's no real evidence that Nissan would have done better if their car was more conventional. The car would probably under performed, it would probably still lack its energy recover system, and budget would be still conservative. I don't think it was Cox that was playing the role of the snake oil salesman but was Nissan of Japan. They spend so much money on marketing, Nissan was the ones who cared about the "image" but the racer development team lead by Cox wanted to actually win Le Mans.

[MoMedic9019]

Originally Posted by FormulaFox

It speaks volumes that the last prototype Panoz built, the LMP07, did better after it's development was terminated and the chassis sold to another company than it did under their development.

What? The 07 wasn't sold, and it was absolute garbage. It had the torsional rigidity of a wet noodle. it was scrapped midseason.

[MoMedic9019]

Originally Posted by Rcz

I have to say, there's no real evidence that Nissan would have done better if their car was more conventional. The car would probably under performed, it would probably still lack its energy recover system, and budget would be still conservative.

And there is zero evidence that this would have been true.

[FormulaFox]

Originally Posted by MoMedic9019

What? The 07 wasn't sold, and it was absolute garbage. It had the torsional rigidity of a wet noodle. it was scrapped midseason.

"Sold" was a mistaken explanation on my part. It was not sold, but another team was allowed to run it after Panoz abandoned the project.

MBD Sportstar ran the car in 2002, modified to use a Mugen-Honda engine. The car ran much more consistently and reliably in their hands, though they never achieved a podium with it.

[Rcz]

Panoz first P1 roadster was actually a mostly Reynard creation. The 07 Panoz was completely a in house by Elan.

[MoMedic9019]

Originally Posted by FormulaFox

"Sold" was a mistaken explanation on my part. It was not sold, but another team was allowed to run it after Panoz abandoned the project.

MBD Sportstar ran the car in 2002, modified to use a Mugen-Honda engine. The car ran much more consistently and reliably in their hands, though they never achieved a podium with it.

Not really. They had an equal level of success. Multiple DNF's and nothing better than 8th.

The engine did sound nice though.

[TF110]

Do we think that Carcamo was trying to move the car towards more rear bias and less reliance on the front? That photo of wider rear tires, failed rear crash test, the autosport story on running hybrid at the rear (solely?)... that has me thinking.

[chernaudi]

The LMP07s were "sold" to Multimatic for 2002 in the ALMS. They only differed from the "factory" cars in that they used a 4.0 Mugen V8 in place of the Zytek 4.0 V8 (both were 4 liter versions of old Formula 3000 engines), and also switched from Michelin to Avon or Goodyear tires.

And they had no better success than Panoz had in 2001--and even then one of the cars nearly won at Texas Motor Speedway and finished on the podium in said race behind both of the Joest Audi R8s and ahead of Champion's debuting R8. But that was the LMP07's only high point.

Also pretty ironic that the LMP07 got it's ass handed to it by a car that was powered by a car running an all-aluminum version of a Ford small block V8 designed in the 1960s (though the aforementioned Ford Windsor small block did in the 1960s in racing in the Lotus-Ford Indy Cars and Ford GT40s at LM what purpose built engines had a hard time doing until the 1980's in terms of performance and reliability. It also convinced GM to make racing Chevy small blocks and big blocks out of aluminum, though the production Windsor was mostly cast iron and steel).

But then again, that says more that the LMP07's chassis was junk than the engines were.

Sadly (and ironically, given Dr. Don's angst against Nissan in recent times), the Nissan LMP1 program parallels the LMP07's largely disastrous life, and that of the AMR-One. Though those programs do get a plus in that both cars did have (albeit often undistinguished, the original DeltaWing cannibalizing a AMR-One chassis not withstanding) afterlives, the AMR-One's failure brought the V12 powered Lolas back, the LMP07's failure brought the big V8 Panoz roadsters back, and at least Panoz had a podium to show for their efforts with the LMP07.

Nissan don't have much to show for their GT-R LMP1 program's collapse. They almost have nothing really to work with and it seems that they don't really have a plan B either.

[joeb]

Merry Christmas. My present to everybody is to close this thread so you all can shut up about the deltawing.

It will reopen in a few days if people actually want to talk about the Nissan

[knighty]

Originally Posted by MoMedic9019

Newey wasn't involved. It was pure rumour.

This car was designed to work with the ToroTrak system, nobody elses. It was too hard to adapt a new system, and still make gains when that was also underperforming as it was adapted from F1.

The car would have been nearly 1-1/2 years behind at LeMans in 2016, essentially two years behind development schedule by 2017. WIth new rules and requirements forcing a whole new car by 2017... it becomes pretty obvious as to why it was binned and not given a further chance.

When you understand that 90+% of the problems were caused by a single third party who continually promised things, and delivered none... it's easy to see where it all went wrong.

I was always supportive of ToroTrak as they do have working systems, but cannot build one to work in motorsports to save their life.

I have been reading last few pages of this thread, and I could not agree more with the above statement, FlyBrid sold a dream that they just could not deliver in reality, I have to say I have found this highly satisfying after listening to years of BS from the founders spouting flawed drivel around the hybrid industry to both potential OEM customers and financial investors. In a way I'm quite pleased this flawed technology has had such a public failure and their name will be dragged through the mud accordingly.

I have to admit to being visibly shocked when I saw the size of the FlyBrid Nissan LMP1 unit, the 2 flywheels looked neat, but the holiday sized suitcase full of hundreds of small clutches just looked like a joke, it looked like an engineering nightmare.........as the old saying goes "if it looks right, it works right"........bowlby is also just as responsible as they should have smelled a rat when the first CAD images came through from Flybrid, they had a turd staring them in the face, yet they still pushed ahead with it.......tut tut.

[chernaudi]

And like with the Audi flywheel and Toyota supercaps, the problem is that those technologies are in their infancy in reality. We're years away from practical road car or very high powered systems like that for racing cars, at least without those things being at least supplemented by a battery system. And though batteries have been around forever relatively speaking, they still also have tons of development potential.

Why do we think that Audi dumped the GKN flywheel for the new R18? The flywheel basically maxed out at like 4.5 or 5MJ at most. Without making the flywheel larger--with its inherent packaging difficulties--that's about all Audi can get out of it right now, and they needed/wanted more hybrid power like yesterday. And that's even with Audi championing the flywheel system's better traits. They even use them as emergency generators at their facilities. But that's a large industrial application, something that flywheel generators excel at. But in a smaller package, until the technology catches up, they're not very practical for most automotive applications. They may be light, but they don't have the power density or storage density of a battery pack in a similarly (dimensionally) sized package.

Toyota's supercaps had much the same problem in the end in that they did end up in a twilight zone that ultimately made them unfavorable--much heavier than a flywheel and lacking the energy storage and density for their weight compared to a battery pack.

As it pertains to Nissan, not only was the ToroTrak flywheel ungodly large compared to the Audi/GKN unit, it was also monstrously complex and complicated. Same for the TMG supercap pack and the Porsche battery pack, as well as the newer Audi and Toyota battery packs.

To add to Knighty's comments, if something looks over-complicated, it probably is, and it's probably not worth it, until the bugs get worked out at least.

[Akrapovic]

Originally Posted by knighty

I have to admit to being visibly shocked when I saw the size of the FlyBrid Nissan LMP1 unit, the 2 flywheels looked neat, but the holiday sized suitcase full of hundreds of small clutches just looked like a joke, it looked like an engineering nightmare.........as the old saying goes "if it looks right, it works right"........bowlby is also just as responsible as they should have smelled a rat when the first CAD images came through from Flybrid, they had a turd staring them in the face, yet they still pushed ahead with it.......tut tut.

Ignoring the Flywheel mess, this also applies to the rest of the car.

[Richard C]

I generally agree with many of the comments that have shown up since the announcement. But given this thread is likely to slowly die along with the project, I figured now is the time to comment…

The project had so many things that had to go right and those same things were at high risk of going wrong. Toss in a likely lack of funding and an unrealistic development schedule and it was a recipe for disaster. I have my doubts about the concept, but it is unfair that we didn’t get to see if it had legs or not. I doubt we ever will.

One thing that drives me crazy is the blame deflection game regarding Torotrak. I don’t think it requires hindsight to see that it was a VERY risky technical direction. Ownership of that decision is where blame is to be placed. Given the native risk of trying a radical concept, the rest of the car (such as the hybrid) should have been about simplicity, proven solutions and risk reduction. The buck stops with those who ran the team.

Nissan probably feels pretty burnt by the whole affair and that hurts the sport. I expect we have seen the last of any real “big concept” project from Bowlby. The Nissan LMP1 and DW projects are likely his last hurrah. Unfair or not, who would invest in a project of that size driven by him at this point? I can't imagine anyone. Maybe only if kept on a tight leash (significant external oversight)

Lastly, I feel really bad for those who worked for the team. I am sure they worked really hard to make things work and unfairly had negativity (pre and post collapse) rub off on them. To make things worse, how Nissan shutdown the project seems to just have added insult to injury. I hope they all find jobs quickly.

Richard

[old man]

I recall that an Audi person commented at the time of the launch "if this works we have all been getting to wrong for years" (or words to that effect?).

The problem designers face is that you never know the total thinking and development process that has lead to a particular solution, you only see the solution that works, you don't see the hundreds of ideas that did not work. In this respect there is no substitute for experience IMO

I have always believed the adage quoted earlier that if it doesn't look right it probably isn't right

Sad for all the staff but a good time to end a project, just before a new season

[Deleted]

Originally Posted by old man

Sad for all the staff but a good time to end a project, just before a new season

Not sure if joking, but if not, canning and redundancies just under Christmas is horrendous, not good timing. Besides the season effectively ended half a season ago so the dev frame was halway through already...

Audi/Porsche/Toyota initial reactions we're pretty much identical in tone to Audi/Pug's to AMR One. So maybe if Subaru or whomever comes along in the future and the others just giggle at their direction, we don't even have to guess what the pace's gonna be at LM.