Nissan no longer a pack of arseholes

However the carmaker said they had prepared for a backlash when they recently announced a 2013 return to Australia’s premier motorsport category.

Nissan driver Jim Richards famously called the Bathurst 1000 crowd “a pack of arseholes” after they booed him and co-driver Mark Skaife for winning the rain-shortened 1992 race in a Nissan GT-R.

The GT-R’s twin-turbocharged engine and all-wheel drive gave it a massive advantage over the more popular rear-drive V8s, and it was subsequently ‘regulated’ out of the Australian Touring Car Championship.

Nissan Motorsport co-owner Rick Kelly is aware of this dark chapter in Australian motor sport, and said the team prepared for it prior to the announcement of Nissan’s return.

“We spent a lot of our time having our guns loaded in terms of fan response. But so far it hasn’t eventuated.” Instead, Rick said the fans have been overwhelmingly supportive.

“The reaction has been very positive. It seems to me the whole fan-base felt the category was a little bit stagnant. They really feel re-energised.”

Kelly did acknowledge that not everybody was happy to see Nissan come back to Australia’s most popular motor sport category.

“So far only three of Kelly Racing’s 400-strong membership base have expressed that they will not continue when Kelly Racing becomes Nissan Motorsport”.

Nissan Australia will enter an Altima sedan in the 2013 V8 Supercar series, powered by the Nissan Patrol’s V8 petrol engine.

Nissan spokesman Jeff Fisher said the choice of engine was important. “We always wanted to go racing with an engine that was relevant to our market. So it was important to choose an engine that Australians can buy in a Nissan”.

Even so, the link is indeed tenuous. Where the Patrol’s V8 is 5.6 litres and produces 298kW, the race car’s version will be ‘sleeved’ to 5.0 litres, and produce in the region of 450-525kW.

As for the race car, it will be rear drive and have a six-speed rear-mounted transmission, whereas the production Altima is front drive and has a continuously variable transmission. Only some of the production car’s body panels will be shared with the race car.

Some have likened Australia’s new motor sport formula to America’s Nascar racing, where car companies drape different bodies over essentially identical race cars.

Kelly says this is not true. He also says that “the [the Altima race car] will have more Nissan DNA than our current Commodore race car has from Holden. Communicating that to the fan-base will be the challenge.”

Nissan MotorSport has said it will reveal the new race car “in due course … later this year”, but would not be more specific.