What did Nissan actually accomplish?

I can't believe that Nissan was trumpeting its unclassified finish among the walking wounded at the Le Mans 24 Hours as "mission accomplished". We expect a bit of spin from underperforming manufacturers from time to time, but what we have read from the Japanese manufacturer after last weekend takes PR puff to a new extreme.

Nissan did always say that one of its goals was to get a car to the finish, but there were other stated targets that the front-wheel-drive GT-R LM NISMO didn't come remotely close to hitting. Like the one about being "significantly faster" than the best of the LMP2s. Or simply being credible.

Nissan's fastest race lap, through Tincknell, was just 0.791s up on the best in LMP2 © XPB

That was a word that had disappeared from the Nissan PR vernacular over the weekend. And quite rightly so. I can't see what was remotely credible about Nissan's performance on its return to the top division of endurance racing.

The Nissan Motorsports team needed to convince the world — and presumably some besuited bosses high up at the company — that the concept behind the GT-R LM holds water. To do that, the Nissan Motorsports team would have been better served by trying to get a decent lap time out of at least one of the cars.

Had a Nissan lapped close to the pace of one of the AER-engined Rebellion R-Ones, the best of the small band of privateer LMP1s at Le Mans this year, it would have provided some kind of validation of designer Ben Bowlby's ideas, at least the aerodynamic ones.

You might think that a manufacturer should be beating an independent every day of the week, but it is not quite simple as that in the brave new world of fuel-formula LMP1 racing.

A decent non-hybrid P1 should be faster than a factory car that was running, as Nissan has now admitted, without its energy-retrieval system engaged. That's just physics: non-hybrid privateers run at a lower minimum weight — 850kg compared with 870kg — and get a larger fuel allocation each lap.

There is a school of thought that the GT-R LM hit some kind of wall last weekend and just wouldn't go much below the eventual best for the car, a 3m35.888s set by Harry Tincknell. But I'm inclined to believe Nissan motorsport boss Darren Cox's assertion that there was more time in the car had the drivers not been directed to stay off the kerbs in the pursuit of a finish. TV pictures backed it up.

A directive to stay off the kerbs only added to the GT-R LM's lap times © LAT

But why not split the strategies to try to achieve both its reliability and performance targets?

If I were wearing Cox's (untucked) shirt, I'd have told Oli Pla, Tincknell or whoever to get out there and rag the thing in the pursuit of a sub-3m30s lap time. Everyone knows that there is oodles of time to be made up around the Circuit de la Sarthe by monstering the kerbs.

Cox has admitted that the GT-R LM had some kind of suspension problem last weekend. The #23 car shared by Pla, Jann Mardenborough and Max Chilton did retire with a suspension issue late on in the race, though Nissan hasn't gone into specifics.

Surely Nissan was being too conservative. Which is strange for a manufacturer that went radical in the drawing office. Or perhaps it was just too fixated on getting a car to the finish. Or maybe there were some kind of safety concerns that led to the call to stay away from the kerbs.

I can't possibly know what was going on in the minds of Cox and Bowlby (who is also, strangely, team principal as well as technical director of the Nissan Motorsports squad) last week. What I do know is that Nissan's performance was a disaster by every measure but its own.

The #22 car, shared by Tincknell, Michael Krumm and Alex Buncombe, might have taken the chequered flag, but over the course of the race it spent nearly eight hours in the pits. That's one third of the race in case your maths is as bad as mine.

Nissan's mechanics were kept busier than most during the race © LAT

Even so, I believe that Nissan was right to be at Le Mans this year, even if it was woefully underprepared. Withdrawing the cars would have been a political disaster for the company, and Cox is right when he says that it was a worthwhile exercise in gathering data ahead of next year.

You might think it's prescient of Nissan to start talking about 2016 following such a dismal showing. But Cox insists that his bosses remain on-side and is still talking about being "right up the front battling with the Germans" next season.

It would be a leap of faith to take him at his word, but Nissan should be able to find seconds by the bucketload if the GT-R LM returns — and returns in the form in which it was conceived.

The Nissan programme began to unravel the moment it became clear that it couldn't run the rear deployment system for the kinetic energy it retrieved from the front axle. (The rear set-up didn't work on the dyno.) Not only did that rob the car of eight megajoules of retrieved energy per lap, but it had a domino effect on successive areas of the car.

Reduced energy retrieval forced a switch to bigger brake discs at the front. That meant a switch to conventional 18-inch wheels rather than 16-inch rims that allowed for the high-profile tyre with which the car was conceived.

Bowlby and his team have plenty of work to do over the next 12 months © XPB

The move was made late enough for Nissan to be unable to develop a bespoke tyre together with Michelin. That ensured that it had to run on the rubber developed for its rivals rather than tyres designed specifically for the needs of front-wheel drive.

One unconfirmed story is that the GT-R LMs have, at least at some point, run an Audi rear on the front. It is also understood that Michelin took a conservative line on tyre pressures, forcing Nissan to run far higher than required for optimum grip and life.

My hope is that Nissan will be able to put the jigsaw back together, which all hinges on getting the hybrid boost to the back wheels.

That in itself will provide a massive gain in lap time that Cox claims is worth four seconds a lap at Le Mans, presuming it can achieve the 8MJ maximum.

A proper tyre developed for the car will yield enormous gains as well. Plus there is the benefit of being able to use the kerbs. Factor in some natural development, and you might get to a total of a dozen seconds or more.

So I hope you can understand that as abject as Nissan's performance was this year, there were reasons for it. And the same reasoning suggests that it can be much more competitive at Le Mans next year.

That is, of course, presuming there is a next year. I cannot be sure that the GT-R LM achieved enough for the project to continue into a second season. But I am sure that some halfway-decent lap times would have given Nissan a better chance of coming back than a "finish" and some spurious headlines.