When Nissan should have won Le Mans

Think Le Mans 1990, and what springs to mind?

A Silk Cut Jaguar one-two after Martin Brundle switched cars, for sure. Maybe Jesus Pareja collapsing into the arms of his team down at the old signalling pits after his Porsche lost second place with 15 minutes to go. And almost certainly Mark Blundell's big-boost pole lap for Nissan.

What you probably don't recall is that this was a race that the Japanese manufacturer could - and arguably should - have won.

History perceives Nissan's seven-car assault on the Le Mans 24 Hours 25 years ago as a massive failure that yielded a best result of fifth place.

It has to be regarded as that because the effort spread across no fewer than five teams didn't deliver the big prize, but one of the marque's cars was in the thick of the fight for much of the race.

And those involved in the running of the Nissan Performance entry shared by Derek Daly, Geoff Brabham and Chip Robinson are convinced it would have won but for a fuel leak.

And the reason for the leak? A problem with the fuel system that had been identified - and fixed - by at least two of the teams but not communicated to the squad made up of personnel from the ultra-successful Nissan Performance Technology Inc team from the US and Ray Mallock's UK RML organisation.

The #83 Nissan suffered a serious issue with fuel in the car © LAT

The #83 Nissan R90CK had topped the leaderboard on the eighth, ninth and 10th hours and ran second to the winning Jaguar past dawn after losing time when the oil-warning light came on when Daly at the wheel. Yet the Anglo-American crew was confident that it could beat the TWR-Jag XJR-12 shared by John Nielsen, Price Cobb and Brundle, who had switched cars during the night.

"We were matching the Jaguar pitstop to pitstop on pace," reckons Mallock, "but they were using about 10 per cent more fuel." Group C remained, for one last season, a fuel formula and cars had a strict allocation of 2550 litres to make it to the end of the 24 hours.

"We were quite confident that on fuel versus pace we were there," continues Mallock, who had equal confidence in the team's preparation of its Lola-built Nissan. "We made sure that all the sub-assemblies, the gearbox and the wheel bearings and all that kind of stuff, were very thoroughly prepared."

Mallock says Nissan was "robbed" in 1990 © LAT

But not as well prepared, at least in one aspect, as the Nissan Motorsport Europe cars run out of the UK and the solo Japanese NISMO-run entry that went on to finish fifth. Brabham had already complained of a smell of petrol in the cockpit when Daly got into a fuel-filled cockpit as 9am approached.

"I was coming through the Porsche Curves and my eyes began to sting and burn," explains the former grand prix driver. "I looked down and could see the fuel sloshing in the passenger side footwell. I got on the radio and shouted, 'the car is full of fuel'. While I was saying that I was thinking, if I brake hard and the skid blocks hit the asphalt, this thing is going to explode like a bomb.

"I came into the pits and an English mechanic called Steve Jenner who worked for NPTI opened the door, looked in and in one fell swoop undid my belts and grabbed me by the chest and literally threw me out of the car."

The first job of the Nissan Performance squad was to get rid of the fuel from the monocoque. Its solution was to pump in water and drill a couple of holes in the bottom of the tub to allow the fuel/water mixture to drain out.

It then set to work changing the fuel tank in the pitlane (no garages back then, remember), but its replacement was damaged in the process. The #83 car was pushed back into the old paddock and with it went Nissan's hopes.

Mallock subsequently found out that NME had identified a design weakness in the fuel system, and it can be revealed that the in-house NISMO team, which won that year's All-Japan Sports-Prototype Championship, had too.

Nissan proved to be its own downfall © LAT

"The fuel collector inside the tank was part of the bag assembly," explains Mallock. "While the tank was full, it was kind of self-supporting, but as the main tank drained down, it left the collector with a mass of fuel in it. That meant it was moving around, and that damaged the tank by pulling the fittings away."

It's not a case of sour grapes on Mallock's part, because Kunihiko Kakimoto, boss of the NISMO in-house motorsport department, confirms the story. Ask him if it is true that the flaw was not communicated to the other teams by NME, he replies: "That is correct. We were Group C champions in Japan and we knew about this weakness."

Nissan's policy at Le Mans that year, Kakimoto explains, was to load the entry with cars. It hadn't gone unnoticed in Japan that the TWR Jaguar team had had five XJR-9LMs on the grid when it triumphed in 1988.

"We could not confirm our reliability, so car numbers were important," he says. "In 1990, I thought we needed more cars. We had three [motorsport] bases, in Japan, Europe and the United States. That is why we were able to bring so many cars. Not every team was running the same specification; each team was allowed to modify details."

The seven cars from the five teams ran on four different makes of tyres and there were clear differences in their specification. NISMO had developed the low-drag aero package also used by Team Le Mans, which ran a car built up around a 1989 chassis like Courage Competition. NPTI and RML made their own changes, too.

They modified the front of the monocoque, removing the Porsche 962-style bump, and opted to run on steel rather than carbon brakes.

RML had come into the picture at Nissan after the Group C programme the organisation had run for Aston Martin under the Proteus Technology banner was canned over the winter. The link between the British team and its American counterpart was made by Mallock's brother-in-law at the time, NPTI crew chief John Christie.

Nissan's issues opened the door for a popular Jaguar win © LAT

"NPTI didn't have the resources to do two programmes, so they asked us to help," remembers Mallock. "Eight of us went over to California for six weeks, running the first car over there. Both cars came over to our workshops near Milton Keynes to be prepared for the race. By the time we got to Le Mans, the team was probably 50/50 our guys and theirs."

Mallock's understanding was that all information from the disparate Nissan teams would be "pooled and shared".

"That's what we did," he says. "We did test reports and every concern we had was circulated. We did our part of and definitely moved the programme forward in that short period."

The winning Jag was only a lap ahead of the Brun Motorsport entry driven by Pareja, team boss Walter Brun and Oscar Larrauri when their Porsche went out with a dramatic engine failure with 15 minutes to go.

Brundle and co had been as much as three laps ahead, but time lost changing the pads when a caliper piston had seized, as well as on-going overheating and gearbox issues, would surely have handed victory to a clean-running 'American' Nissan.

"To be let down by something that was known within Nissan was dreadful," says Mallook. "It was very unfortunate. They were robbed really. Or we were."