DeltaWing race car project loses Nissan support - Team VVV

News DeltaWing race car project loses Nissan support

News

James Allen

Writer

Posted on

In a shock announcement, Nissan has stated it is no longer a part of the DeltaWing race car project,

Despite the DeltaWing's impressive debut in it's inaugural outings in various races around the world – with the cherry on the cake being a 5th place finish at the last year's 1,000 mile 'Petit Le Mans' race – Nissan Motorsports confirmed on it's Twitter page that it would no longer be backing the development of the car.

This doesn't mean, though, that 2012 will be the only year the realms of endurance motorsport events will see the DeltaWing compete and tussle with the LMP prototypes it was originally envisioned to be a match for.

According to the words of Don Panoz – the principal of DeltaWing Racing Cars, as well as the founder of not only the American Le Mans Series, but also the Panoz automotive and race car companies – an updated version of the original DeltaWing is in the pipelines, with the biggest alteration being considered is the adoption of a closed canopy for the cockpit.

Without Nissan support, the 1.6 four-cylinder petrol engine – that's derived from the same engine you can specifiy in the Nissan Juke road car – is all but certain to be made redundant, with the word on the street being that a heavily revised, twin-turbocharged 2.0 Mazda unit replacing the Nissan block.

It's also suggested that this new Mazda motor will generate up to 345bhp, which is 45bhp more than what the Nissan engine can produce.

So, should the DeltaWing return to the track in 2013, there's always the chance of it showing up many more Le Mans Protoype racers in whatever endurance series it ends up competing in…

0 0 votes
Article Rating
0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x