They’ve had a horror V8 Supercars endurance season but Nissan Motorsport feel they’re back in the hunt this weekend on the Surfers Paradise street circuit.
Todd Kelly and David Russell secured the team’s best endurance finish with an 11th place at the Sandown 500 while James Moffat and Taz Douglas’s 18th at the Bathurst 1000 was as good as got for the outfit at Mount Panorama.
The team’s VK56DE engine, derived from the road-going Nissan Patrol, can’t match the racing-specific engines used by both Ford and Holden for straight-line speed while the Nissan Altima’s aerodynamics allow it to handle superbly in corners but affect top speeds.
But the layout of the 2.96km street circuit for the Gold Coast 600 features just one main straight and several chicanes and tight, 90 degree bends.
It’s a formula that has Nissan Motorsport co-owner Todd Kelly feeling his team’s fortunes in the co-driver section of the season are about to change.
“The straight is still reasonably long, so we will be down on straight line speed a bit there, but if we really get on top of the set up early and do a good job, like we did with the Norton cars at Winton, we can have a good result,” Kelly said.
“It certainly won’t be as bad as Bathurst, but it’s certainly not going to be as easy as Winton. It’s somewhere in between.
“The key to the event is qualifying. If you don’t qualify well, you’re in for a pretty tough day.”
Kelly believes his team is still discovering the small kinks that come with racing Altimas in the V8 Supercars championship, but is hopeful progress is being made with an eye on 2014.
“When you look at what we have in our Bathurst engine spec, versus what we had at Clipsal, we’ve made massive progress, but that really hasn’t translated into any more straight line speed, or very minimal,” he said.
“We have a lot better acceleration. The car feels good off the corners, but anything over 200km/h, we really haven’t seen any gain from the additional horsepower.
“It does lead us into the area of aerodynamics to try and get on top of it for next year.
