First spy images of Nissan GTR LMP1
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Jalopnik are showing off some captured images of a shakedown of the new Nissan GTR LMP-1,running at COTA. It’s certainly interesting looking, if not exactly what you’d call beautiful. As rumoured, it appears to be front-mid engined, like the old Panoz cars, though with the small modern cockpit it seems a little less balanced, dimensionally speaking. Notice that the front wheel and tyres are visibly larger than the rear, possibly supporting some of the other rumours that this car could be either FWD or AWD with a strong front-bias.
It’s great to see such an innovative design appearing on the grid, even if it probably won’t be gracing many posters on bedroom walls!
http://blackflag.jalopnik.com/exclusive-see-and-hear-nissans-front-engine-gt-r-le-ma-1680363700
Looks absolutely badass and – I guess thanks to the BOP approach – it can be actually that different from the rest, not just in terms of engine formula (all are different), but engine placement as well.
Very nice find, thank you. :)
Well the car was finally officially launched yesterday. Looks like the rumours were true – not only is it front engined, but it’s actually front wheel drive (at least using the ICE). Looks a lot better with some paint on it, but it’s still a weird looking thing to my eyes. Kudos to Nissan though for thinking outside of the box, though that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise considering it is the brainchild of Ben Bowlby, designer of the mad DeltaWing.
http://www.speedcafe.com/2015/02/02/qa-ben-bowlby-explains-gt-r-lm-nismo/
Oh… and 1250bhp when it’s all turned up to 11…
Really exciting bit of new carness. On a different level from F1’s refined and tweaked 2015 cars, because of what the WEC rules allow (I’m sure the F1 teams would produce something mad if they could – I’d like to think Adrian Newey’s now spending half his time on a rival for this!)
It could blow the others away, like Ross Brawn’s Jaguar in 1991 (and the colour scheme reminds me of that car a bit).
The Michelin men will need to get the tyres right, just like the 6-wheeled Tyrrells, the Deltawing and that Wirth car in the States with the big front wheels.The hugely experienced Marc Gené is the first driver to be confirmed as part of their lineup, too. Nobody else has been confirmed, although I firmly expect Nico Lapierre to be part of the team, given how he’s no longer part of the Toyota lineup, despite them stating their intentions to keep him. It’ll be fascinating to see who else becomes part of the team, I’d expect (and hope) to see Nissan’s Super GT champs Tsugio Matsuda and Ronnie Quintarelli as part of the lineup in some capacity. I’ve seen Nick Heidfeld and Olivier Pla mentioned too. Then there’s also the GT Academy graduates, most likely Jann Mardenborough, as well as long-time Nissan man Michael Krumm… the list is endless. The amount of world-class drivers we’ll see in LMP1 this year is staggering. There’ll be 33 drivers in factory LMP1 cars at Le Mans, by my count. It’s a shame Fernando’s not allowed to do it…
As for the car, massive props to Nissan for keeping their promise of it being unique. It’s my understanding that the last time a front-engined car won Le Mans was in 1962, so it’s certainly a bold undertaking.
How much of the power is usable according to the regulations? Aren’t there limits about either how much they can generate or use? I’m curious about how often any of these cars are actually able to hit their peak figure.
The regs are a bit hard to understand, but from what I gather, there’s a limit on the amount of energy which can be discharged through each lap, but no specifics on exactly how quickly that energy has to be discharged. So basically the restriction is on the max fuel flow rate to the ICE, and then how much energy can be used per lap. I think there are a few other rules regarding energy use over a stint etc. But basically what it boils down to is that you can either take a massive speed boost for a short space of time (like 1000hp for a few seconds) or take a smaller boost throughout the course of the lap. Being in the 8mj class, it means they have the biggest restriction on the amount of fuel they can use, but the biggest allowance of harvested power that they can use.
The reason they’ll have gone for the (seemingly baffling) FWD option for the ICE is actually pretty simple. The way that energy is harvested under braking is by using a recovery system attached to the driven wheels to slow the car down rather than the brakes. The more of the braking that can be done by the energy recovery system, the less power is lost, and the more energy is harvested. Most hybrid race cars are rear wheel drive, so only harvest from the rear wheels. This is not ideal really, as most of the braking is done by the front wheels – if you had a 50/50 brake bias you’d have a car that was pretty unstable under braking. So if you have a FWD car, you can harvest a lot more energy through the driven wheels than on a RWD car. Clearly Nissan’s thinking here is all around maximising usable power and efficiency for the best possible top speed, possibly at the expense of a little bit of driveability at the corner exit, and also probably as a bit of a compromise to the chassis layout.
It really is a very cool concept, and great to see them really thinking about the rules without making any assumptions about the kind of layout that’ll work best. As I said above, it’s abolutely consistent with Ben Bowlby’s ‘blue sky thinking’ approach that we saw with the DeltaWing and the ZEOD. Throwing ‘conventional wisdom’ in the bin, and thinking logically about an engineering problem with a blank sheet of paper, to come up with the best possible solution.
Actually, in answer to your question, I think that probably the 1250hp figure is a little bit conservative. I reckon at full tilt, the combination of the ERS and the ICE would be able to produce well over 1500hp’s worth, but only for a very short burst of two or three seconds. I suspect they’ll have a number of different harvesting and discharge options that they can use both in qualifying and throughout the race.
Thanks for such a comprehensive answer. Although it’s great to hear such impressive power figures, it’s a shame that they can be fairly meaningless if it only translates to being usable a couple of times a lap. Same story with the F1 cars, for which I assume even the quoted ICE figures only apply to when the car hits the redline- which it doesn’t at present.
To be honest horsepower is a bit of a meaningless figure since it doesn’t really translate into the actual power that the engine uses to turn the wheels, it’s rather a figure to measure the peak efficiency of the engine at its maximum output. The key issue is the fuel flow rate. If you think about the current F1 engines, they are allowed, within the rules, to rev to 16,000rpm. But again, this is a meaningless figure without the context of the fuel flow rate.
Fuel burns at its peak power when mixed with a specific amount of air, which is why on a small capacity engine, you need to hit high rpm to generate power, because the amount of ait going into the engine is determined solely by the movement of the pistons. We don’t know precisely what the ideal air:fuel ratio is for F1 fuel but let’s say was 13:1 (13 parts air to 1 part fuel). We know the maximum peak fuel flow allowed is 100kg/h then the maximum peak airflow is 1200kg/h. The displacement (cc) of an engine is the total volume of the swept area of all of the cylinders, so each rotation of the crankshaft sucks in a specific amount of air through the inlets.
On a naturally aspirated engine the peak rpm is the point where the engine is turning fast enough to draw in air at the rate required to achieve the correct air:fuel ratio for the maximum fuel flow rate (in our example, 1300gk/h). If the cylinders are large, each rotation of the crankshaft draws in a lot of air, so that peak airflow is achieved at a low RPM, whereas on a smaller engine, it will need to be turning faster in order to suck in enough air. So if you had a limit on the rpm of 20,000rpm in the technical regulations, but the peak airflow was achieved at 18,000rpm, then there would be no point in revving the engine much higher than that – you can’t physically burn more fuel than the maximum allowed flow rate, and otherwise you’re simply sucking in more air and screwing up the air:fuel mix and losing power.
Of course, here we’re talking about turbocharged engines, so it’s not just the movement of the cylinders drawing air in, it’s being pumped in at a rate much higher than that. But the result is still the same – peak power is achieved when the air is going into the engine at the rate of 1300kg/h, regardless of rpm.
Sorry, this is a really long and rambling way of saying that if they’re only revving to 13,000rpm, it’s because that’s the point where they’re making peak power, and revving any higher than that would not create any more power, because the maximum fuel flow rate has already been passed.
Obviously, fuel flow and rpm aren’t the only factors in how much actual power is generated. It’s a pretty inefficient system, so a lot of the potential energy created by burning the fuel is lost and not turned into actual twisting force at the output shaft. Specifically talking about F1, the faster the engine is turning, the more loss there is through friction, so it’s in their interests to generate the power at a lower rpm by using more boost from the turbo, than using lower boost at a higher rpm.
This really is the key to an energy-efficiency formula, because the level of actual power generated is determined by how effectively the engineers can minimise the amount of power that is lost through inefficiency. Or in the case of ERS, taking some of that lost energy and turning it into a form that can then be recycled back into the system. It’s the real reason why manufacturers are so interested in the engine formulas in F1 and WEC, because the technology designed to minimise inefficiency in their race engines can then filter down to their road car engines, making their road cars more powerful and more efficient.
Sorry for the massive, very boring and probably highly inaccurate post.
More drivers; LMP2 frontrunners Harry Tincknell and Olivier Pla have been announced as full-time drivers for the #22 and #23 cars respectively. Super GT champion Tsugio Matsuda has also been announced as a driver in their third car for Le Mans. At least I guessed two of those right! ;)
Very strong lineup so far – Olivier Pla is surely one of the top LMP2 drivers in the world and Tincknell is a Le Mans 24 class winner and possibly the standout performer of last year’s ELMS.
There are certainly plenty of seats available if they’re going to run three cars at le Mans. I’d be surprised if we didn’t see Lucas Ordonez taking a seat, as well as at least another headline Japanese driver.
And the next three drivers are…Michael Krumm, Lucas Ordoñez and Jann Mardenborough.
Ordoñez will be in the number 21 third car at Le Mans, alongside Matsuda.No surprised faces this time – Krumm’s an established Nismo man and he’s been testing the car for weeks but what a story: two GT Academy winners getting their shot at LMP1.
Looks like Mardenborough’s doing the full season – interested to see what this means for Jann’s single-seater career, and if he can fit any more GP3 around it.
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