The Nissan LMP1 Car: Advantages and Innovations

The Nissan LMP1 car has made headlines in the world of endurance racing for its unique drivetrain configuration, which sets it apart from its competitors. In this article, we'll delve into the advantages and innovations that make Nissan's LMP1 car stand out from the crowd.

Weight Distribution: A 70/30 Split

According to a guess by an industry expert, the weight distribution of the Nissan LMP1 car is approximately 70% rear and 30% front. This weight distribution has significant implications for the vehicle's performance under braking. With only 20% of the load transferring to the front wheels during braking, the Nissan LMP1 car has a substantial amount of kinetic energy available for recovery.

Kinetic Energy Recovery: A Significant Advantage

The Nissan LMP1 car's unique weight distribution means that it can recover up to 50% more kinetic energy under braking compared to its competitors. This is because the front wheels have a much greater proportion of the vehicle's mass, which translates to a higher potential for kinetic energy recovery. With 90% of the load transferred to the front wheels, they are able to harness a significant amount of energy that can be converted into electricity and used to propel the car forward.

Frontal Area: A Key Factor in Aerodynamic Efficiency

The placement of Nissan's engine at the front of the vehicle has several advantages. The engine is placed up front, which allows for a smaller frontal area compared to rear-mounted engines. This reduction in frontal area is achieved through the use of an aerodynamic diffuser that exits through the rear of the vehicle rather than out the sides. The air flows into the front diffuser and then exits out the back, reducing drag and increasing overall aerodynamic efficiency.

Aerodynamic Efficiency: A Key Differentiator

The Nissan LMP1 car's unique frontal area is a significant differentiator from its competitors. By allowing air to exit through the rear of the vehicle rather than out the sides, Nissan has created a more efficient aerodynamic profile. This means that the car can travel at higher speeds with less energy expenditure, giving it an edge over its competitors.

Rear Diffuser: A Key Area of Focus

The rear diffuser is another key area where Nissan's LMP1 car stands out from the crowd. The use of a smaller width tire (9 inches) compared to its competitors has several advantages. Firstly, this allows for a larger diffuser, which can be used to manipulate airflow and reduce drag. Secondly, it creates a gap between the tires and the diffuser, which can be used to optimize aerodynamic performance.

Aerodynamic Features: Optimizing Performance

The Nissan LMP1 car's designers have taken full advantage of this gap to create aerodynamic features that can optimize performance. By manipulating airflow through the diffuser, they can reduce drag and increase downforce, giving the car an edge over its competitors. This innovative approach to aerodynamics is a testament to the team's commitment to innovation and excellence.

Conclusion

The Nissan LMP1 car's unique drivetrain configuration and innovations in aerodynamic efficiency make it a standout performer in the world of endurance racing. With its 70/30 weight distribution, kinetic energy recovery system, and aerodynamic features optimized for performance, the Nissan LMP1 car is a force to be reckoned with on the track.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everyone and welcome in this video we're going to be checking out why the Nissan GTR LM Nismo is front-wheel drive with a front mounted engine now when I first heard about the Nissan lmp1 car being front engine front-wheel drive I thought it was kind of just this marketing stunt to build hype around the project but actually there's some very good reasons for why they did it and so we're going to be kind of looking at four of the reasons here uh about why this might be advantageous versus their competition so starting with the first one center of gravity versus Center of pressure and this kind of comes down to the rule books uh because basically the rear wing and the rear diffuser are very much so restricted so everyone's going to be running something very similar whereas the front of the car is much more open for aerodynamic changes and so because everyone has uh basically the same thing going on at the rear maximum down Force at the most efficient way possible uh it's difficult to move the center of pressure back and so when you have a car that's rear wheeel drive and you have your center of gravity back here what you want to do is put your center of pressure over that so that the car steers neutrally now if your center of pressure is behind your center of gravity for a front-wheel drive car your car is going to be uh under steering because you've got more uh load on the rear tires than on the front tires so those front won't be able to hold versus if your center of pressure is uh above the center of gravity then you're going to have over steer because you don't have enough traction on your rear tires so what this does with the Nissan lmp1 car is they're able to move the center of pressure up towards the center of gravity which is closer to the front uh and they're able to do this efficiently because the front of the car is more open for aerodynamic uh features and so the cars that are rear wheeel drive are trying to pull this back uh and the basically the rulebook is trying to prevent them from doing that uh whereas in Nissan's case the rulebook is kind of allowing them to bring that Center of pressure forward so they can have a very neutrally handling car even though it's front engine front-wheel drive which you might think would just be tons of under steer so they're able to set that up really well the other thing is energy recovery so one of the other things they've done uh because they have the center of gravity closer to the front let's just say it's a 7030 split uh weight distribution uh not that this is coming from Nissan this is just kind of a guess 7030 split and let's say under breaking uh 20% of the load transfers to the front so it's a 90 uh 10 split so 90% of the braking done by these front tires well if the front wheel are the ones that have the kinetic energy recovery system hooked up they're going to be getting 90% of that load 90% of the weight of the car available for use in kinetic energy recovery so if our car was let's just pull out a simple number 1,000 kog then we'd have 900 kg that we could use for kinetic energy recovery now if we look at the competition and say they have a 4060 split because it's rear wheel drive and they've got a slight rear bias and then on braking they have 60% low loow transfer to the front well that's going to give him 600 kg if the car weighed 1,000 kg and so as you can see the Nissan here at 900 versus 600 50% more uh Mass to use for kinetic energy recovery so potentially because kinetic energy is a function of mass time velocity squared they have a potential of 50% more energy that they could recover now yes the other team could uh recover energy from both axles but speaking with Nissan they said no one currently did this they just did it from one axle uh and there's kind of some strange restrictions around that but basically uh if you do that if you do recover from both axles you're going to be adding weight to your vehicle and you're going to be adding complexity uh neither of those are desirable so basically this comes out as a big Advantage for Nissan because they're able to recover more energy under braking another thing to talk about is the frontal area of the vehicle and this comes down to Nissan's engine placement because the engine is placed up front and all the drivetrain and complexities are up front the back of the vehicle is very open and what this allows for them to do is to have the diffuser exit through the rear of the vehicle rather than out the sides of the vehicle which is more traditionally done by some of the other teams so what this looks like when you're looking at the vehicle is you've got your air coming in up front it's going underneath the vehicle going up into that front diffuser and traveling out the exit of the vehicle now the other cars are going to have that air coming in underneath the vehicle going up that front diffuser and then exiting the sides of the vehicle so you can see as this car is traveling through the air its profile is much smaller because it doesn't have this air spilling out where you're essentially decreasing the frontal area because you're allowing that air that's hitting the car to exit out the rear rather than to the sides and so that's another advantage that they've got going for them as far as aerodynamic efficiency now getting on to the rear diffuser and the rear tires because their car uh is heavier in the front and the front wheels are doing the driving they've used the largest tires Poss possible at the front but because the rear tires don't need to be that large they've actually used a smaller width 9 in versus 14 in the rear and this gives them a pretty specific Advantage so because their tires are more narrow two things can happen one you can actually increase the range of your diffuser so you could use a larger diffuser uh than if you were using wider tires which everyone else is doing all the other teams are running 14-in tires in the rear because their rear wheel drive and it makes sense uh from a grip perspective to have as large of possible tires back there based on their weight distributions and the drivetrain of the vehicle the other thing this does is it gives them a gap uh and they can manipulate this Gap you know with aerodynamic features so that they don't have spill over from these tires into the rear diffuser so without that turbulent spillover this diffuser is going to be much more efficient whereas the other teams are going to have to choose between using a large diffuser with a lot of spillover which is what they'll end up choosing or a smaller diffuser uh where they have spillover from these tires creating turbulent air and decreasing the efficiency of the diffuser so overall there definitely are some very uh distinct reasons why Nissan went with this uh sort of drivetrain front engine front-wheel drive and so if you are curious about more information on the Nissan lmp1 car I will include links in the video description to their Channel head over and check that out if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below thanks for watchinghello everyone and welcome in this video we're going to be checking out why the Nissan GTR LM Nismo is front-wheel drive with a front mounted engine now when I first heard about the Nissan lmp1 car being front engine front-wheel drive I thought it was kind of just this marketing stunt to build hype around the project but actually there's some very good reasons for why they did it and so we're going to be kind of looking at four of the reasons here uh about why this might be advantageous versus their competition so starting with the first one center of gravity versus Center of pressure and this kind of comes down to the rule books uh because basically the rear wing and the rear diffuser are very much so restricted so everyone's going to be running something very similar whereas the front of the car is much more open for aerodynamic changes and so because everyone has uh basically the same thing going on at the rear maximum down Force at the most efficient way possible uh it's difficult to move the center of pressure back and so when you have a car that's rear wheeel drive and you have your center of gravity back here what you want to do is put your center of pressure over that so that the car steers neutrally now if your center of pressure is behind your center of gravity for a front-wheel drive car your car is going to be uh under steering because you've got more uh load on the rear tires than on the front tires so those front won't be able to hold versus if your center of pressure is uh above the center of gravity then you're going to have over steer because you don't have enough traction on your rear tires so what this does with the Nissan lmp1 car is they're able to move the center of pressure up towards the center of gravity which is closer to the front uh and they're able to do this efficiently because the front of the car is more open for aerodynamic uh features and so the cars that are rear wheeel drive are trying to pull this back uh and the basically the rulebook is trying to prevent them from doing that uh whereas in Nissan's case the rulebook is kind of allowing them to bring that Center of pressure forward so they can have a very neutrally handling car even though it's front engine front-wheel drive which you might think would just be tons of under steer so they're able to set that up really well the other thing is energy recovery so one of the other things they've done uh because they have the center of gravity closer to the front let's just say it's a 7030 split uh weight distribution uh not that this is coming from Nissan this is just kind of a guess 7030 split and let's say under breaking uh 20% of the load transfers to the front so it's a 90 uh 10 split so 90% of the braking done by these front tires well if the front wheel are the ones that have the kinetic energy recovery system hooked up they're going to be getting 90% of that load 90% of the weight of the car available for use in kinetic energy recovery so if our car was let's just pull out a simple number 1,000 kog then we'd have 900 kg that we could use for kinetic energy recovery now if we look at the competition and say they have a 4060 split because it's rear wheel drive and they've got a slight rear bias and then on braking they have 60% low loow transfer to the front well that's going to give him 600 kg if the car weighed 1,000 kg and so as you can see the Nissan here at 900 versus 600 50% more uh Mass to use for kinetic energy recovery so potentially because kinetic energy is a function of mass time velocity squared they have a potential of 50% more energy that they could recover now yes the other team could uh recover energy from both axles but speaking with Nissan they said no one currently did this they just did it from one axle uh and there's kind of some strange restrictions around that but basically uh if you do that if you do recover from both axles you're going to be adding weight to your vehicle and you're going to be adding complexity uh neither of those are desirable so basically this comes out as a big Advantage for Nissan because they're able to recover more energy under braking another thing to talk about is the frontal area of the vehicle and this comes down to Nissan's engine placement because the engine is placed up front and all the drivetrain and complexities are up front the back of the vehicle is very open and what this allows for them to do is to have the diffuser exit through the rear of the vehicle rather than out the sides of the vehicle which is more traditionally done by some of the other teams so what this looks like when you're looking at the vehicle is you've got your air coming in up front it's going underneath the vehicle going up into that front diffuser and traveling out the exit of the vehicle now the other cars are going to have that air coming in underneath the vehicle going up that front diffuser and then exiting the sides of the vehicle so you can see as this car is traveling through the air its profile is much smaller because it doesn't have this air spilling out where you're essentially decreasing the frontal area because you're allowing that air that's hitting the car to exit out the rear rather than to the sides and so that's another advantage that they've got going for them as far as aerodynamic efficiency now getting on to the rear diffuser and the rear tires because their car uh is heavier in the front and the front wheels are doing the driving they've used the largest tires Poss possible at the front but because the rear tires don't need to be that large they've actually used a smaller width 9 in versus 14 in the rear and this gives them a pretty specific Advantage so because their tires are more narrow two things can happen one you can actually increase the range of your diffuser so you could use a larger diffuser uh than if you were using wider tires which everyone else is doing all the other teams are running 14-in tires in the rear because their rear wheel drive and it makes sense uh from a grip perspective to have as large of possible tires back there based on their weight distributions and the drivetrain of the vehicle the other thing this does is it gives them a gap uh and they can manipulate this Gap you know with aerodynamic features so that they don't have spill over from these tires into the rear diffuser so without that turbulent spillover this diffuser is going to be much more efficient whereas the other teams are going to have to choose between using a large diffuser with a lot of spillover which is what they'll end up choosing or a smaller diffuser uh where they have spillover from these tires creating turbulent air and decreasing the efficiency of the diffuser so overall there definitely are some very uh distinct reasons why Nissan went with this uh sort of drivetrain front engine front-wheel drive and so if you are curious about more information on the Nissan lmp1 car I will include links in the video description to their Channel head over and check that out if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below thanks for watching\n"