What let Nissan's brave concept down?

There are some who will clamber back upon their high horses and claim that Nissan's innovative GT-R LM NISMO was always doomed to failure. I'm not one of those, but the sad truth is that the front-wheel-drive LMP1 was heading nowhere for most of its short life.

The car was never going to achieve much in 2015 once it became clear that it couldn't be raced in the form envisaged in Ben Bowlby's brave concept. That concept slowly unravelled once the deployment of its hybrid boost through the skinny rear wheels and tyres had to be abandoned for year one.

Taking energy from the heavily-loaded front axle and sending it to the rear courtesy of a highly-efficient, fully-mechanical hybrid system was one of the foundation stones upon which the concept of the GT-R LM was built. Restoring that building block was the key to unlocking the potential in this avante garde design.

When the rumours started that the second-iteration of the Nissan P1 would have what we might call a conventional kinetic energy retrieval system, I feared the worst. When someone who might know suggested that it would only recover from the rear axle, I knew the project was - and I do hate the word - doomed.

Bowlby was replaced as team principal to focus on technical duties, Darren Cox left Nissan altogether © LAT

This system didn't replace that vital missing piece in the foundations. Rather, it provided a buttress to prop up the ideas behind the design. That's the architectural analogy, anyway. An engineer would probably call it a patch or a plaster.

The name of the game in the new era of LMP1 prototype racing in the World Endurance Championship is efficiency. That includes maximising energy-retrieval. It's even enshrined in the regulations: cars running in the highest hybrid sub-classes are allowed more total energy.

My question is how was Nissan going to get into one of the higher classes, retrieving only from the rear axle? Recuperating energy from the front wheels under braking is more efficient than doing so from the rear, and that's supposing you have a conventional rear-engined racing car.

Imagine that you have a car with the weight distribution and aero balance shifted forwards because you were originally planning to take a massive amount of energy out of the front axle under braking. What chance would that have given Nissan of making it into the highest 8MJ class like fellow petrol-powered rivals Porsche and Toyota in 2016?

It's probably best to let Bowlby explain it with some of the words he used when he ran through the ideas behind his radical concept with me at the beginning of 2015: "You want to recover from the front where you have a lot of downforce, and you want to put the weight up there because you will then have a better chance of recovering a lot of energy."

The official line from Nissan is that the withdrawal from the WEC has resulted from uncertainty over its likely competitiveness, because it was facing the prospect of developing the second-generation car at the same time as racing it. I do buy that, to an extent.

The GT-R LM might have only raced once, but Nissan had to wash its dirty linen in public at the Le Mans 24 Hours this year. There's no way it could be seen to be doing so again.

Testing, not racing, became the focus after the Le Mans baptism of fire © LAT

That can only be part of the reason, and the lesser part. The concept behind the GT-R LM had been undermined and couldn't be shored up with a quick-fix conventional solution. Nissan must have realised that.

We know that the Torotrak front-to-rear hybrid system as it was conceived never made it to the race track. We also know the compromise solution that retrieved and deployed through the front wheels didn't race at Le Mans for what Nissan called reliability reasons. (And how much and how successfully it ran in testing can only be a matter of speculation at this moment.) Those facts on their own explain why the mechanical system developed in the UK was abandoned.

I'm not sure that there was an alternative available, certainly not within the required timescale, which is why Nissan had to go conventional. Opting for an electrical system forced it to the rear axle to harvest its energy for reasons of weight: the forward weight distribution of the GT-R LM mitigated against placing a motor-generator unit on the front axle.

The saddest part of the GT-R LM saga is not that the car dragged down the reputation of a manufacturer with a strong sportscar tradition, albeit one that doesn't include a Le Mans victory. It's that we never got to see the car run as intended.

I'm not saying that the history of the 2015 24 Hours would now be substantially different had that been the case. But I do reckon that the GT-R LM NISMO in all its unexpurgated glory would have made a lot of people sit up and appreciate Bowbly's blue-sky thinking.

And knocked a few people off their high horses.