The new car will contest the LM P1 class of the FIA World Endurance Championship. With more technical freedom than Formula 1, the LM P1 engineers have ample opportunity to innovate, Nissan noted. Nissan also announced three multi-year partnerships that will feature prominently in its LM P1 program: TAG Heuer is the Official Watch Partner and Official Timekeeping Partner; Motul is the Official Lubricants Partner for the program; and Michelin is the tire provider.

The GT-R is our flagship road car. This, the ultimate GT-R, continues a sporting bloodline that goes back three decades with NISMO, the motorsport and performance arm of Nissan. Le Mans drives innovation, so success on the track will lead to greater innovation in our road car range. We are the new kids at Le Mans. Our opponents are the best in the world, but we are ready.

—Roel de Vries, global head of Marketing and Brand Strategy at Nissan

Unlike other LM P1 cars, the GT-R’s V6 3.0-liter twin turbo gasoline engine sits in the front of the front-wheel-drive car, while the hybrid power is harvested from the front driveline to augment acceleration. The cockpit has been moved significantly rearwards to accommodate the engine at the front of the car. The ERS is housed ahead and beneath the driver’s feet in a self-contained module.

We have a very modern but conventional V6 3.0-liter twin turbo gasoline engine. This is a very efficient engine so it produces a large amount of power using the allotted fuel flow limit. The fuel flow limit is one of the new regulations at Le Mans. We’re not limited by the engine capacity or the boost pressure or the RPM of the engine; we’re limited by how many grams of fuel per second we can burn. So the more efficient you make the engine, the more power you have because you are still burning the same amount of fuel whether you are efficient or inefficient. So if you can make a very efficient engine, you get a lot of power. We are burning a smaller amount of fuel, around 30 percent less than was used by a gasoline engine at Le Mans in 2013, for example.

—Ben Bowlby

The LM P1 regulations for manufacturers have four hybrid powertrain options, defined by how much hybrid energy is released from the ERS per lap of Le Mans (the Le Mans track is used as the baseline circuit): 2MJ/lap, 4MJ/lap, 6MJ/lap and 8 MJ/lap.

Each megajoule is worth an amount of time per lap, so if you are an 8MJ car compared to a 2MJ car, you should be faster over the course of a lap. There are however some very big challenges, one of which is that you have to get the car down to the minimum weight because every 10-12 kilos is about half a second a lap around Le Mans. So if you have more weight in the car, that slows you down pretty significantly. The challenge is to package a big, powerful energy recovery system without going over the weight limit, and that is very hard to do. We’re going to be really challenged to make our weight target of 880 kilos for 2015 when half of the weight of the car is the powertrain—engine, ERS and the driveline—so that’s a very big challenge.

—Ben Bowlby, Nissan’s LM P1 Team Principal and Technical Director

The 3.0-liter engine is a 60-degree V6, direct injection gasoline twin-turbo unit, mated to a 5-speed + reverse sequential gearbox with pneumatic paddle shift system. FIA FIA Homologated weight for the racer is 880 kg (1940.06 lbs).