Making a quick street car is easy in comparison to racing, which is easy in comparison to racing successfully. As impressive as Nissan’s GT-R is — and make no mistake, it is mighty impressive — Nissan really ought to be racing it a lot more.
As it turns out, Nissan will be letting its big dog off the leash more often. Or perhaps we should say big lizard, because Nissan’s GT-R isn’t called Godzilla for nothing.
Big, brawny, and with enough street presence to pick up a bus and throw it back down, the GT-R has been making boy racers’ hearts flutter for a while now. But what sort of presence will it have on the track?. Nissan hopes that it will have a lot.
“For the 2010 race season, Nissan has decided to unleash the GT-R’s potential as a race machine, waging war in three different series on four continents,” reads the company’s chest-thumping press release just in from Japan.
In North America, Nissan will team up with Brass Monkey Racing to contest the World Challenge GT Championship. In Europe, the Middle East, and South America, a quartet of GT-Rs will do battle in the 2010 FIA GT1 World Championships. And in Asia, three GT-Rs will carry on Nissan’s successful association with the Super GT Series.
“I have been racing in the FIA GT Championships for many years, but now I’m very excited about the new world championship and very happy to be driving the Nissan GT-R,” said Karl Wendlinger, who has taken his share of checkered flags in the FIA GT1 series. He’ll be at the wheel of a Swiss Racing GT-R in the season-opener on April 17 in Abu Dhabi, UAE. And yes, that would be the same Karl “Wingbender” Wendlinger that ended up in a coma after a nasty Formula 1 accident at the ‘94 Monaco GP.
Brass Monkey is just as psyched as their Euro counterparts: “We’re very excited to bring such an iconic car to the North American professional racing scene. We look forward to bringing an entirely new platform to World Challenge,” said team owner A.J. Brass.
The Japanese contingent is equally keen, with driver Satoshi Motoyama — who won the Asian championship in 2008 in a GT-R — raving this years’ machine is “improved significantly” and should be “very competitive.”
And just what are those significant improvements? Nobody is saying. These guys are racers after all, and they’re not tipping their hands to anybody. All we got out of Nissan is a little GT-R porn. Enjoy.
