Nissan Altima firms for V8 racing role

Nissan’s next-generation Altima will be unveiled at the New York motor show. The company has issued this teaser shot of the new car.

Leaked travel plans firm up Kelly Racing’s link with forthcoming new large car.
An appearance by V8 Supercar driver Rick Kelly at next month’s New York Auto Show appears to confirm that the Nissan-sponsored Kelly Racing team will drive the company’s new Altima model in next year’s championship.
An all-new model of the Altima, a smallish large car that has been sold in other markets for years, will be unveiled in New York on April 4 and is set to replace the ageing Maxima as the flagship of Nissan Australia’s range when it arrives here next year.
Nissan and Kelly Racing shocked the V8 paddock last month with the announcement that they would team up in 2013 as Nissan Motorsport, breaking the sport’s long-held Ford-Holden duopoly as well as a career-long bond between Holden and brothers Rick and Todd Kelly.

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It will be the first time another manufacturer has contested the championship since 1993, when new rules dictated cars must be rear-wheel-driven and powered by a V8 engine – ironically, largely to stop the Nissan GT-R that dominated racing in the early 1990s.
The company’s public relations manager, Jeff Fisher, would not confirm whether the Altima would become the factory-backed team’s racing platform in 2013.
However, he says Kelly Racing co-founder Rick Kelly will accompany a group of media to the New York show next month where the Altima will be revealed.
“We thought it would be a good idea to incorporate Rick into that group,” he says. “It’s a pretty big moment for Nissan Australia with that particular product likely to play a major role in our passenger car line-up and we want to be there at that moment.”
Kelly Racing’s job in preparing up to six cars for next year’s championship has been made easier by the 2013 Car of the Future project, which enshrines a common body shell for all manufacturers onto which they can bolt their own panels.
Fisher says the switch to a common architecture made the project viable for Nissan.
“The chassis, transaxle (gearbox) and so on is all control, so that’s what made it an attractive proposition for Nissan to come in and look at the V8 Supercars as an expression of brand development,” he says.
“So in terms of how the chassis gets built, all the teams are basically doing the same thing. The panels, no matter which car we use, are the skin that it uses.”
Kelly Racing has already ordered a set of body panels that are currently being stamped in the US.
Kelly Racing chairman John Crennan says there is still plenty of work still to be done.
“Todd (Kelly) has been up just before the announcement to Nismo in Japan, and there is an enormous amount of work being done behind the scenes on this,” he says.
“Given that it’s an all-new model, you’re not dealing in production parts so we have a very big job ahead of us.”
The biggest issue will be under the bonnet, where Nissan has received permission to use a V8 engine with overhead cam technology – a step ahead of the pushrod V8s employed by the Holden- and Ford-backed teams.
“We say that the differentiator for us is in the technology that we’re going to employ under the bonnet, which will be a recognisable Nissan V8 engine,” Fisher says.
“All Nissan production engines at the moment are overhead cam, so we don’t have a pushrod in the range.
“If we didn’t have access to be able to user our own powerplants there would have been zero traction for us, that was one of the things that clinched it for us, was that we could use our own technology.”
Nissan is expected to make an announcement shortly after the New York auto show to confirm that Kelly Racing will use the Altima in the 2013 championship