Wednesday 31st October 2007

GTR Racer On Track

New Nissan's race-prepped sibling shakedown

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GTR flexing its muscles at Suzuka

The Nissan GT-R road car has done a pretty comprehensive job of wowing the world’s motoring press at Tokyo – us included.

Now Nissan is continuing to build up the buzz surrounding that car’s debut by wheeling out the track-spec version that it will campaign in the Japanese Super GT series.

Instead of the 2-litre 300bhp front wheel drives we get in our BTCC, the Japanese series takes a somewhat more hi-tech approach.

The GT500 class, which is the highest in the series, allows a much freer reign on modifications, so racers can pick and choose engines, add forced induction and, as long as the car bears a passing resemblance to the road car on which it’s based, carry out a pretty major overhaul of the aerodynamics too. Races are much longer too, with rolling starts and driver changes part of the action.

Under the supervision of NISMO (that’s Nissan Motorsports International Co Ltd, don’tcha know) the new GT-R racer ran for two days at the Suzuka Circuit.

Yoshitaka Iijima, NISMO’s team director for SUPER GT, said “The test went well without any problems. We obtained positive feedback on the car’s potential from the drivers. We are aware of the NISSAN GT-R popularity and racing heritage. We will make our best effort to win the championship next year.”

Now Mr Iijima, how about a banzai NISMO road-going version?

[willdew]

And you can bet there'll also be one in Gran Turismo 5

[Panayiotis]

New aero pack for the 350z based racer to make it look like a gtr...nothing to see here.

[MrKipling43]

http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&a...

[guyh]

[shadowninja]

Technically, it isn't a repost because it's a comment on the PistonHeads news story.

[semprini27]

This is basically the current 350Z GT 500 (the one that has been doing the business at Goodwood FoS the last couple of years) with some new body bits and the new GTR based engine.