It is interesting in the light of yesterday’s ruminations about F1 engines that Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Nissan and Renault, will be announcing “major news” for Nismo motorsport and its performance arm on Tuesday in Tokyo. For some time there have been rumours that Nismo was undergoing major changes in order to be transformed into Nissan’s equivalent of Mercedes’s AMG. Nismo has spent the last 30 years tuning Nissan vehicles and it is believed that the announcement on Tuesday will reveal that Nismo will soon start to mass-produce Nismo-branded vehicles. That process has already begun with the Nissan Juke Nismo and a Nissan 370Z Nismo is due to be unveiled in Geneva shortly, but it seems that the process is going to be extended and that there will be motorsport activities to support this development. The big question is what form of racing Nissan is going to target.This does not mean that the company is planning anything in F1, but it is worth watching out for the announcement.
In recent months Nissan has been looking at DTM (which has agreed a regulation deal with the Japanese SuperGT Series) and the FIA World Touring Car Championship, in addition to launching a programme in Australia’s V8 Supercar Series, while sources also suggest that involvement in the World Endurance Championship and the World Rally Championship have been considered.
joeblogsf1 
For Europe it will make sense to join BMW and Mercedes-Benz in the DTM series as their biggest competitors are already active there. They are already active in V8 supercars for the coming season.
LMP1 instead..?
I wonder if they’re stepping up there WEC involvement following the split from deltawing?
I’m not sure it had anything to do with the split from Delta Wing, but may rather be the next step in Nissan’s path.
It’s probably unrelated but Quimera Responsible Racing (@QuimeraRR) has been hinting all week on twitter about a future development they are involved in with the Nissan DeltaWing. Quimera best known for alternative fuel racing cars and they’ve also recently bought the Circuit de Terramar near Barcelona.
Nissan are no longer involved with the Delta Wing.
yeah i know that’s why i said probably unrelated
Awesome, I’m a Nissan man and reckon then Nismo brand is great.
I suspect that Nissan had their head turned by the passion of fans in endurance racing. There was no real need for them to withdraw support for the DeltaWing programme, unless they were thinking of entering in the same space.
My bet is an endurance racing programme in the short term. I don’t think DTM has the right reach level at present, but if DTM and SuperGT continue their alignment programme, we could see Nissan entering there along with V8 Supercars, for a tin-top presence with global reach.
Yep, Endurance Racing……
Guessing it’s WTCC with RML. Yvan Mueller has confirmed he will be taking part in the 2013 season as have RML with an as yet unnamed partner.
In a slightly unrelated note, do you have any word on the collapse of Goodyear tyre company, or the recent comments by Titan boss that it would be “stupid” to invest in France due to their poor manufacturing output? Especially given this is where Renault engines are manufactured, and where they are trying to get a revived French GP.
A collapse? The company just announced sales in 2012 of $21 billion, with a profit of $272 million. If that is a collapse, I’d like to have one. As to the remarks made by the boss of Titan, I think it is a wake-up call that France does not want to hear and so it will be ignored. I think it is ridiculous to compare work ethics in a doomed and over-unionised tyre factory with those of a vibrant and ambitious engine company.
Fair. The BBC piece said that Goodyear were “troubled” – in this climate, that usually means something’s about to go tits up.
How about Nissan joining NASCAR? Good rival for Toyota
Would it make sense for Nismo to enter DTM under the Infinity Nismo nameplate as competing with the likes of Audi, BMW and Mercedes would possibly be a better marketing strategy?
With Infinity already involved with Red Bull, why aren’t those engine’s rebranded??
Should be interesting as the Infinity branch of Nissan is on the Red Bull cars.
I really can’t see F1 or Sports Cars being chosen. However, the Nismo Juke fits so well with World Rally regs, that that has to be favourite for me. The engine has been tried and tested with the Delta Wing and has not been found wanting in power and reliabilty. WTCC would also fit I suppose.
Just to let you know that a portuguese website is translating your post word by word and posting them on the news, don’t know if they have your permission. And the translation is misleading.
http://autosport.sapo.pt
They don’t have my permission.
As i figured, i commented on the news item, and surprise surprise the comment was deleted right away. Will pm their admin in your behalf if you give me permission. Or i’ll try and find a contact e-mail and post it here.
Go ahead!
Sometimes I think I should be in the copyright enforcement business. If you could muscle just one ad network into dis-engorging profits from their commission on these thief sites you’d suddenly have a lot of targets. Front page ad for Essilor, a very large French ophthalmic optics company.
What’s the PR value of being named as either a supporter or a dupe of a criminal action? (I grossly dislike the extent to which copyright infringement has been afforded draconian measures, but there was always criminal sanction in the law.) You could – and can – go up stream, if not getting past ISPs’ common carrier protections, but at least nix the transit for website traffic. Now imagine how that would affect the ad network?
Let alone the cost of actually dropping the traffic a core routers, which is non trivial. (Having managed a network or two, that’s something in engineering terms I would be vociferously against, it’s not trivial to muck with how anything truly internet facing works, but as ultimate sanction it is possible. Moreover now SDNs or software defined networks are more common, getting easier.)
My parentheses belie my own conflicts. But you should see how a agency defends what they assume is their copyright, claiming work for their client is theirs – so doing muscling out small brokers such as my ilk – without one iota of supportable fact behind the argument. (I’ve had to defend this practically against very well funded opponents. The thing is, they will only go to court, or to trial in particular, if they think you will fold, because a case against them would change a bit much to their dislike.) Why else would a space jockey know diddly about copyright law? Sometimes I feel I’m in a “industry” of one, and certainly you have tremendous hurdles learning enough to operate independently in between the gaps left by giants. Used to think of it like those birds who tend to hippopotamus complexions, at least in being fleet of flit, as it were. One has to avoid being accidentally crushed. However, increasingly I see a need for a independent role in the ad game, to call out the far more damaging conflicts such as noted here. If you had a real independent sector, there might be very real functional and effectively enacted opprobrium.
Another irony of avoiding being squished by a big fat agency is to make like those birds on the hippopotamuses, I had to learn the funny business of companies. I wish I could feel like George C Scott as Patton, yelling “Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!” but it’s early days . .
Was watching a lecture, very brilliant, though the very young – and clearly exceptional – researcher whose work showed the proof needed his prof really to do the high level explanations, to couch in broader meaning, about how there’s a Turing complete machine in the memory management unit of a x86 pocessor – wait a mo, there’s a point here believe it or not . . – and it was a super piece of research work. But what it made me think of, is if you wanted to translate French to Russian, or vice versa, no matter the relative language complexity on either side, you must attain the highest common denominator to be even okay. Inside the memory management of a process, a lot of things happen for safety that require a understanding of what the chip is trying to do at the time. So I thought that very similar to translation, and therefore a logical discovery the young researcher made. I could understand it at a different unit of reason. (Skipping I studied stack machines for a year, and know a bit about the guts of some chips, and did some highly analogous initial work, but absolute credit to the very young guy who delivered the lecture. Tip for the inexperienced at delivery, rude words are not befitting as a repartee with a audience, seeking commonality and appreciation even if the subject of a quip deserves crude observation . your insecurity is showing . . ) . . . .
I promised a point to this diversion: It’s that to figure out what is going on in a system like advertising, you have to be in another way “Turing Complete” (and that’s the most stretched metaphor I’ve used in years, see Hofstadter, Godel Escher Bach for starters) because you have to understand all sides of the argument at the highest denominator, not the lowest. Just because Russian uses umpteen constructions to give simple travel directions, and French uses far fewer, does not mean you can get by with the lesser comprehension and not get lost or send a poor stranger on a wild goose chase.
I think it’s high time there was some functional, active, and real, and operationally capable, middle ground in the advertising world.
Totally honest with you, I think much of my life suffered Stockholm Syndrome to one faction or the other, and when it didn’t I was riven with what I see very much as moral conflicts in business. A most perspicacious young man, having asked me to describe my “job”, said “You must hate your work, John.” Funnily, he worked for BBC Monitoring, translating Russian political broadcasts . . That was my 30th birthday, so I am using “young man” literally, he was about 21. “Job” is in parentheses equally, because I chose my own direction. Largely not knowing what that was. Just ricocheting from one unpalatable truth to another in a very fuzzy business.
I am plainly not sure at all whether anyone else has explored these contradictions, or their impact on publishing of well written word, or the negative cultural impact this has, in solely commercially functional terms. I don’t think a average career would support it, and I stated with a silver spoon wedged up my rear. Not that that amounted to a hill of beans, because actual commerce costs on a scale no but the largest of inheritances can tolerate. I’ve been stony broke plenty enough.
This comment probably should be on my company website. But it is relevant to here, and in it you find answer in part to why in 16 years since registration, I don’t have a company website. Too many constituencies to offend all too easily!
But it makes me angry, that bare faced profiteers conduct daylight robbery of a man’s work. That silver spoon up my rear came from my father’s writing. (Silver spoons are unfortunately not very useful in the real world, I could make you very seriously not jealous of my life, if I but recounted some parts.)
The problem remains, that even if I played poacher come game keeper (which because you play both anyhow, is a Mobius ellipse with its own danger) that would not have the effect that a intermediary constituency would have. Some case law would be good. There’s enough already though, that given the resources, Joe could seek redress easily. What I want to see is independent brokers looking at these thieving sites and downing their tools, saying “sorry mate, not touching you again.” As unlikely as it seems, that’s a aim I seek. I think it far better than making laws ever more draconian to compensate for the lack of access to practical law that already exists, because all of that still remains inaccessible to a busy small publisher. The expansion or arbitrary criminalization has created a parallel market for intellect and services that detract from the very issue of what copyright law is meant to protect, the literal freedom of speech, and right to freely make a living therefrom.
The V8Supercar program is labelled Nissan Motorsport & nismo, but is mostly still a private entrant running with. (Some) help from the parent
Nothing like the Gibson Motorsport equipe of the mid 80’s and ’90’s.. they were a full works outfit.
Ah memories. Inspiring for a 5 year old me watching the Bathurst 1000 on VHS – this and then Gran Turismo cemented me as a GT-R fan. I’ll have one one day.
The Nissans in the fantastic V8 Supercars series are amazingly fast right now. I can’t wait to see how they will do in the actual events. Success there might lead to more motorsports involvement worldwide, even the above suggested NASCAR might become reality. But I doubt they will join F1, seeing Honda’s and Toyota’s miscalculations there. I think Nismo wouldn’t want to ruin their call in the gamble that F1 is.