Nissan says Le Mans test day was positive for new GT-R LM NISMO

Sunday's Le Mans test day still represented a success for the the front-wheel-drive GT-R LM, according to the Japanese manufacturer's global motorsport boss Darren Cox.

"There are a lot of positives to take from the test," Cox told AUTOSPORT.

"We have three cars sitting in the garage right now with nothing wrong with them.

"We only had one problem that stopped us out on track and we covered a total of 1500km across the three cars.

"We were fastest in the speed trap and at the end Jann [Mardenborough] was one of the fastest cars on intermediates."

Cox said the only disappointment was that rain restricted dry running over the course of the eight hours of track time.

"We needed the maximum possible dry running, so the rain was exactly what we didn't want," he said.

Cox made the comments in spite of a best time for the GT-R LM that was more than 20 seconds behind the pace-setting LMP1 Porsche and nearly 2.5s behind the fastest P2 at the end of a test held in mixed conditions.

The fastest time from one of the three Nissans was a 3m43.383s set by Olivier Pla in the #23 car before the rain arrived approaching the end of the second hour.

That compared with Brendon Hartley's best time for Porsche of 3m21.061s and Laurens Vanthoor's 3m41.949s LMP2 benchmark in the OAK Racing Ligier-Honda JSP2.

Nissan was denied the chance to go quicker during a short period when the track was dry in the afternoon because its cars were in the garage having their mirrors repositioned after they had failed a field-of-vision test.

Cox re-iterated his claim that that the GT-R LMs would easily outperform the best LMP2 machinery in qualifying next week ahead of the 24 Hours on June 13/14.

He has stated that Nissan's simulations suggested that the car would be "significantly faster" than the P2s.