At the wheel of the Nissan ZEOD

This started back in 2006. It was my first full year as editor of AUTOSPORT and prior to the start of the season I'd come up with a series of high-concept ideas that could be used on the cover on those weeks where there hadn't been a Formula 1 race and news was thin on the ground.

One of these was "Why motorsport must go green" (subsequently altered to F1 by the powers-that-be).

Following its publication, one prominent F1 team boss of the day kindly took the time out of his busy day to ring me up to tell me that I didn't know what I was talking about.

Eight years later and we're on the cusp of a new season of F1 with the most environmentally friendly power units yet, the Le Mans 24 Hours can only be won by an electric-hybrid prototype and the all-electric Formula E series is but nine months away and gathering serious momentum.

Such is the importance of using motorsport to develop and showcase 'green' technology, Nissan is using its radical garage 56 entry to build awareness of its ZEOD (Zero Emission On Demand) products that will be appearing on driveways near you with increasing regularity over the coming years.

For the sake of this article, we'll call the Le Mans project the ZEOD.

Mardenborough is AUTOSPORT's guide to the ZEOD © LAT

It's a supremely ambitious car. In F1 next year, the electric boost will be worth around 200bhp for roughly 15 seconds. The ZEOD will run around 500bhp worth of electric-only power to complete a lap of La Sarthe in less than four minutes. This is truly pushing the envelope of technological know-how and limitations.

Given how much development work is required to get the car ready for Le Mans, Nissan surprisingly agreed to allow us to have the world's first track test. So, on a cold and damp winter morning at the Bruntingthorpe Aerodrome, 2011 GT Academy winner Jann Mardenborough squeezed through the tiny gull-wing doors and in almost complete silence zipped off into the distance as he put the ZEOD through its paces.

While the car will eventually be a hybrid, mating a small-capacity turbocharged engine to the battery-powered electric motor, at present it's running as a pure electric vehicle, albeit one with a conventional five-speed sequential gearbox.

"When I first drove it, it sort of reminded me of the NISMO Leaf RC car, which I've driven a few times and was the first electric car I'd ever experienced," says Mardenborough.

"What you get is the instant torque, but obviously with gears - with the Leaf and other electric cars with a single drive they run out of steam fast - but with this you have five gears and it keeps pulling hard through the gears."

The nature of the power delivery and the near-vertical torque curve has required a few compromises to the transmission.

"One thing I did notice was that because the car has so much torque instantly, first gear is limited because it might snap a driveshaft," adds Jann. "But once you get into second you're away and it keeps pulling."

The ZEOD will go round corners © LAT

The ZEOD is the creation of Ben Bowlby, the designer of the ground-breaking DeltaWing that ran at Le Mans in 2012. When its radical design was first unveiled it was met with a chorus of incredulous "It'll never go round corners" jeers.

While the DeltaWing comprehensively proved the theory behind the concept was correct, when you see the ZEOD in the flesh, with the super-narrow front end and the almost bike-sized front tyres, you can't help but wonder how it works...

"It's a car that you only have to look at and you ask yourself 'how is that going to turn?'" confirms Mardenborough. "Surely it should tip over on its side like a Reliant Robin!"

But as he blasts through the long sweeper that lies in front of the temporary paddock that top team RML, which is running the car, has assembled on the outside of the track, it's more than clear that not only does it go around corners, it has grip to spare.

"When I was driving, initially I kept well within myself, but once I got pushing a little bit there's so much feedback through the wheel," he says. "There's no power steering, and it's very bumpy here so you feel a lot.

"Usually in an LMP car - at least in the Zytek LMP2 I've driven - there's power steering and not that much feeling through the wheel. But this is like driving an old car. You feel really connected to the front of the car, and that's nice.

Mardenborough reckoned the ZEOD reminded him of a go-kart © LAT

"Like an F3 car you can feel when the front end is scrubbing the tyres through the wheel, and I've not felt that in a closed-cockpit car before.

"It's pretty fun to drive. It feels like a big go-kart. Because it's so light you don't feel any inertia being moved around, it moves side to side really quick and it feels really agile. It gives you a lot of confidence, I was never worried about the rear stepping out and when it does it's very progressive, not snappy."

There may not be any lack of grip in the car, but that doesn't mean it doesn't require a different style of driving. The huge difference in width between the front and rear axles means that drivers have to miss the apex with the front wheels but try to hit them with the rear.

Get the nose over too much into a corner and the rears will be on the grass, or in the gravel - or worse thrown up into the air by one of the 'sausage' kerbs that are used these days to stop drivers from cutting the track.

"I had bit of help before driving the car for real by having a go on the sim at RML," says Mardenborough. "At first even on the sim it was weird. I was going nowhere near the apex with the front wheels, yet I'm hitting the apex with the rear wheels. How does that work?

"In the real car at the moment it's early in production and it has no mirrors on it and one thing drivers do is look in the mirror and to see where the rear tyres are. But in this, because there is no mirror and because the rear is so wide, at first it's difficult to position the car.

In the ZEOD, it's the rear wheels that you want on the apex © LAT

"When you've been programmed to hit apexes with your front tyres, to not hit them is something my brother or dad might be used to, but me not so much!"

Bruntingthorpe is not the perfect destination for testing a car's braking performance, but the RML simulator, noise aside (it currently has a soundtrack courtesy of a World Touring Car Championship Chevrolet Cruze), gives a very accurate representation of the car's performance. Having completed a few dozen laps around Silverstone in the ZEOD sim, there were some quirks in the braking performance that Mardenborough picked up on.

"At the moment it has an open diff, but they're looking to put an hydraulic diff on it to help with braking," he says. "One thing I noticed is that when you arrive into a corner where you need to trail-brake it's very difficult to do that because the diff doesn't lock.

"In a straight line it's completely fine, but you lose compared to a car that can trail-brake into those type of corners. You really experience it in the sim at somewhere like Village at Silverstone, where it starts hopping on the brakes and you're not really sure what it's going to do next.

"The feel through the pedal was pretty standard, but one thing I learnt from the engineers about the regenerative system was that the driver can change the amount of re-gen that's taking place.

"I was asked about the balance and whether I'd have to adjust the bias, but the car does that for you, which I thought was very clever and one less thing to think about."

And that's what the ZEOD is all about. The narrow front end dramatically reduces weight and air resistance, meaning that less power is needed to produce the same amount of performance.

Nissan's last shot at outright Le Mans success was with its 1997-9 GT1 programme © LAT

By adding in some groundbreaking battery and regenerative technology, the ZEOD has encouraged one of the world's leading car manufacturers to return to Le Mans.

A condition of the 2014 Garage 56 ZEOD entry is that a full-blown works Nissan entry follows in 2015. It's a clear case of how embracing environmental technology has benefitted one of motorsport's blue riband events.

And it looks pretty cool too.

JANN MARDENBOROUGH PROFILE

It's fitting that for a car that embodies a lot of the spirit of motorsport in the 2010s the driver should be a product of a system that was unavailable to any previous generation.

Jann Mardenborough never raced karts competitively. He never went to the track and hung around in the paddock begging for a drive. He never went to a racing school where the dynamics of single-seater racing were explained. Yet he finds himself on the Formula 1 ladder (Formula 3 or GP3 are the most likely options for 2014) with backing from one of the world's biggest car companies.

Jann owes his career to Nissan and its sponsorship of the 'computer gamer to professional racing driver' GT Academy programme.

"The first time I learnt about it was in 2008 when I saw a TV ad for it," he says. "At that time I was 16 or 17, so I couldn't enter.

"In 2010 I could have entered but I was doing my A-levels at sixth form, I went to university for about three weeks to do motorsport engineering. I dropped out because I realised I was no Adrian Newey.

Mardenborough had to go straight in at the deep end in European F3 © XPB

"I wanted to do Formula Student, but I realised I wanted to be the driver rather than making the car. I took a gap year and applied again, but in January 2011 I entered GT Academy and started to progress through the various stages.

"By June I'd won, so I had to ring the university and tell them I was going to be a racing driver instead!"

Having impressed Nissan motorsport boss Darren Cox with his ability, attitude and potential in British GT in 2012, Mardenborough was placed in British F3 the following year, a big departure from the usual GT drives the previous winners have taken.

But with the series reduced to just four rounds, Jann was thrown into the competitive deep end of the European championship, where he raced against people such as new Toro Rosso F1 racer Danill Kvyat and Ferrari protege Raffaele Marciello.

He also made his Le Mans debut, scoring an LMP2 podium racing for Greaves Motorsport.

"I didn't think I'd be doing Formula 3 or rising through the ranks," he admits. "I thought I'd be driving GT cars, Le Mans maybe. A couple of years ago I'd have been looking at things like this ZEOD test on YouTube and thinking 'wow that's awesome'. Now I'm the person doing these things.

"It's very fulfilling and it would never have happened without the GT Academy. I'd probably be doing track days with people coming up to me saying 'you're pretty good, you should be racing MX-5s or something.'"