Nissan to electrify Le Mans with unique race car

Nissan will debut an electric race car in next year’s Le Mans 24 Hours. Appropriately, it has selected a graduate of its gamer-to-racer program to be its development driver: Spaniard Lucas Ordóñez. The Nissan ZEOD RC will hit the track next month for testing, with Ordóñez taking the wheel.

Looking like only half of a race car when viewed from the front, the ZEOD RC is similar to the DeltaWing race car, with which Nissan was involved for some time. The idea is to produce a race car with less weight and frontal area, while having similar cornering ability. Like the DeltaWing, the ZEOD race car has a wider rear than front.

The appointment was announced at the Nissan 360 global media event in California. The 28-year-old Ordóñez won the inaugural Nissan PlayStation GT Academy competition in 2008. He has gone on to win races in the real world, with Le Mans 24 Hours podiums, a championship win in the 2011 Intercontinental Le Mans Cup and a third place recently at the Spa 24 Hours for Nissan with an all-gamer line-up of GT Academy graduates.

Nissan’s Director of Global Motorsports Darren Cox believes that Ordóñez will make a valuable contribution to the development of the new ground-breaking race car. “The fact that Lucas didn’t enter the sport the traditional way through karting and junior formulas actually makes him ideally suited for the development role for the Nissan ZEOD RC,” Cox said.

“Lucas was the first to prove that the GT Academy concept works and the succession of Nismo Athletes that have graduated since that time has continued to show the programme is extremely valuable in unearthing and developing new talent. The Nissan ZEOD RC is unlike any racecar previously developed and Lucas doesn’t have 10 or 15 years of pre-conceived ideas as to what a race car should or shouldn’t do,” said Cox.