Anyone who secretly gives the green light to a Nissan GT-R engined Juke on the basis it sounded like a bit of fun sounds like an alright chap to us. And so it proves when we met Infiniti's General Manager for Innovation and Performance Projects Jerry Hardcastle at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. If the job title's not exactly snappy it does what it says on the tin and Jerry's biggest job at the moment is making the GT-R engined
Q50 Eau Rouge
into a viable product and, with it, setting a template for an Infiniti performance division.
Quite a cool thing to have on the CV
A straight-talking northerner, Jerry's background is at Austin Rover and, for the bulk of his recent career, Nissan. An engineer by training, he's done engines, project management, vehicle evaluation and been vice president of Nissan's vehicle design and development department. Projects like the
Juke R
and a matey relationship with fellow Brit (and friend of PH) Darren Cox who manages Nissan's motorsport suggest a pleasing sense of mischief behind the serious corporate facade though, a long-standing relationship with Ray Mallock of RML seeing through projects like the mad mid-engined Micra 350SR of a few years back as well as more serious assignments like the
Q50 Eau Rouge
Can Infiniti really offer an alternative to M, AMG, Audi RS and the rest though? The Eau Rouge is the first step in that process, but it's a long one and we're only at the early stages.
"The original brief was a demonstrator that runs," says Hardcastle. It's got three audiences, one is the customers out there to increase the awareness of Infiniti and to test the idea of having a performance arm, it's for you guys - it's a story, it's exciting - but it's also got an internal purpose of saying look what we could do. So it's communicating internally and externally and we've got the engineering team now looking at it seriously what can be done."
Eau Rouge at FoS just a teaser sadly
So the car you may have seen at Goodwood is, quite clearly, not a prototype of a near-production M3/M4 rival. Sorry.
"This is funded by marketing and communication with an engineer overseeing it and the decision now is do we go and make it," he says, the 'engineer' in question of course being himself. The inside line on that side of it is interesting too.
"The idea was why don't we make a performance car, let's see what it feels like. The request to me and others ... to Alfonso [Albaisa, Infiniti's head designer] in San Diego was 'Alfonso can you design one', 'Jerry can you find an engine'," he explains. "So we looked at increasing the performance of the 3.6 that was already in it - we could improve that relatively easily - and we looked at a V8. We've got VK45 racing engine we've got VK56 in the Patrol and Q80. And then of course we've got the brute itself and Johan [de Nysschen, Infiniti's president] said to me I'm interested in all three but I want more than 500hp and if possible I want more horsepower than a GT-R."
Having transplanted the GT-R engine into a Juke as a bit of a skunk works project Jerry had previous on that score and hence the decision was made. But he had to make it official this time.
GT-R engine gets another new home!
"Can I tell my story?" he asks his worried looking PR handler. "Basically Juke R ... we didn't tell them. With Juke R a group of us in Europe said 'wouldn't it be fun' and then people said 'OK how are we going to do that?' We thought if we ask we'll be told not to do it so we thought we'll build Juke R with Ray Mallock again and my good friend Darren Cox - it was secret until it went viral on the internet and the bosses said I hope you had nothing to do with it and of course I denied all knowledge. But after it went viral and the execs said it was the best idea we'd ever had all the hands went up and of course I said 'oh it was mine!'"
This time it had to be more official, but how did it actually come about? "Using the toy box we took a Q70 transmission - we couldn't use the GT-R transmission with the four-wheel drive and the transaxle as we'd have lost some rear seat space - so we decided to attach a Q70 gearbox to it a seven-speed AT." He admits an autobox perhaps isn't the ideal option but it works, this and the passive dampers keeping things relatively simple. "We decided we'd better be able to stop it so we put GT-R brakes on it and that was it. The amazing thing was we didn't have to change the chassis which we thought we might have to but apart from anti-roll bars and things like that it's pretty much stock."
More on this soon hopefully
As an engineer what does he like though? He mulls it over for a bit, saying steering matters and ride quality too. "I like a car that you can drive quickly but doesn't shake your teeth out I have utmost respect for something like a Megane RS but I would never have one, not in a million years," he says. He offers an interesting analogy based on his hi-fi instead. "I have an old Cyrus amplifier and it's got three knobs on it, volume, input, output and I've no bass treble, equaliser or nothing; I trust the guys at Cyrus to set it. I said that's the sound I want and the only thing I had to do was to make sure I had good curtains in the living room to reproduce it and that's me." It's a surprisingly revealing statement, and reassuring too in an age where gimmickry is too often getting a front seat.
So the Q50 runs and it's doing a job, one that Hardcastle describes in endearingly blunt terms. "When we do it we do it right because if you rush into this you could get it really wrong - either too much power and kill it or not enough power and it's just carbon and fluff." He pauses to collect his thoughts. "So we've got to get this balance of how much flower arranging do we need, how much engineering do we do and then strike the balance we want."