If you have arrived at Le Mans will already know the weather is far from balmy.. but we have a secret weapon called Lennart and he knows all there is to know about weather. So we asked him what the forecast might be and the gist of it is today is looking depressingly wet because we have a nasty blob of 'weather' floating about but it might clear by midnight. So predictions are that the track probably won't be totally dry. Thursday looks like it might start dry then rain again from 18:00hrs. Then Friday will be damp with scattered showers. So take a brolly on the pit lane walkabout. The good news seems to be that Saturday will be dry towards the end of the day and Sunday much the same. Us lower grade forecasters reckon that seaweed, pine cones and our creaking joints all predict rain, sunny periods, showers and cloud!
Looking at the entry list it is interesting, well, fairly interesting.. that there are 22 LMP2 cars out of a grid of 56 cars. That is a pretty high proportion. Then look again and you will notice that of these 22 cars 15 of them have Nissan engines. So we had a chat with a guru who knows about these things and the tale goes like this.. There is a major Championship in Japan called Super GT. It has the sort of status that DTM has over here in Europe. From 2007 Nissan supplied their VK45 V8 engine to the front runners. This was a production based engine that appeared in all sorts of top of the range saloons and more recognisably in the Nissan GT-R.
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| The two Zyteks of Greaves Motorsport are powered by Nissan. |
Then in 2010 the regulations changed and the 3.5 litre engine was replaced by a 3.4 litre one. This left Nissan with a shelf full of the 'old' 4.5 litre engines. So Nismo, the competition branch of Nissan, built an engine alongside Zytek. The idea was later taken up by Oreca and a very effective LMP2 machine emerged in 2011. The rest they say is history!
So we know who Nismo are.. they are the very successful worldwide motorsport side of Nissan. Next we wondered who DENSO were. DENSO as you recall is plastered all over the Toyotas. They seem to be one of those colossal multi-national companies that we have never heard of! To quote their website.. DENSO operates in 35 countries and regions.Approximately 130,000 employees are active in all aspects of the automotive business -- sales, product development and design and manufacturing -- working in cooperation with regional car manufacturers and suppliers to provide the most suitable solutions to regional requirements. Global consolidated sales totalled US$38.1 billion for fiscal year ended March 31, 2013.
Pictures courtesy of "Dottore" ( kristof.vermeulen@gmail.com Raceshots.be )
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