Forward thinking

At Le Mans, the victors have tended to follow the conventional wisdom of their time. As a rule, engines sat amidships, sending power to all four wheels through increasingly complex hybrid and energy recovery systems. And with very good reason. Who would ever even consider front-wheel drive as the primary medium for transmitting power from car to track not for a daily runabout, but for competing in the world’s most famous endurance race?

I’m not saying it has never been done before, because it has, the best result by such a car being the sixth place scored by an Alvis in 1928, but those very few that have braved it in the intervening years have tended to have tiny engines, compete for minor class honours and come from manufacturers only true devotees have heard of. Like the 745cc Deutsch et Bonnet HBR-5 Spyder that came 9^th in 1959, the most recent top 10 finish by a front-drive car.

Which makes Nissan’s return to La Sarthe in 2015 with a car capable only of powering its front wheels seem all the more bizarre. At the time and in the intervening years reactions to the project have varied between bemusement and ridicule. So perhaps now is as good a time as any to talk to the man who was Nissan’s Global Head of Motorsport at the time and find out exactly why the Nissan GT-R LM NISMO ended up the way it did, and why it went so horribly wrong. That man is Darren Cox.