Which car dethroned the Porsche 962? It was this Nissan GTP ZX-Turbo.
The year was 1989 and, for the first time since 1983, something other than the Stuttgart brand won the IMSA GTP constructor’s championship. Just the year prior, Geoff Brabham won the IMSA drivers’ championship in a ZX-Turbo after winning eight straight races.
While many remember the dominance of …
Went looking for period in-car footage, but found this rad-as-heck vintage commercial:
Nissan's GTP car was the first (or one of the first) race car to control fuel, spark, and boost electronically. F1 at the time was doing fuel and spark only.
Willes wrote a book about his time there a few years ago, Developing a Champion: The Electramotive Nissan GTP Story
It's a hefty 400 page tome filled with photos and drawings. He also wrote about the manufacturing processes and suppliers they used, almost all in southern California. They used ARP for head bolts but at the time they didn't have metric threads.
In reply to j_tso :
Very cool. Thank you for sharing.
I got a little too excited about the "400 page tome filled with photos and drawings" part. I'm a sucker for period photos and old technical sketches.
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