No turbos or all-wheel drive to be seen. Nissan has fallen into line with V8 and rear-drive for next year's season of the V8 Supercar championship. The company turned away by the administrators of the sport in 1993 is rejoining — and already some fans are arguing that the new car will be irrelevant, sharing little with the nascent production car yet to spawn it. But the announcement seems to have garnered more positive comments than negative.
"Aussies across the country will embrace Nissan," said Dan Thompson, Nissan Australia MD during the press conference when the announcement was made.
Thompson expects the fanbase to expand broadly once the company becomes involved in the series. It won't be a matter of recapturing the brand loyalty of an aging demographic; Nissan is certainly not banking on the faded memories of old fogies who remember turbo Bluebirds (and George Fury) in Group C Touring or Skaife and Richards winning at Bathurst in a Skyline — before Touring Cars were restricted to V8 rear-drive sedans the following year.
In truth there's a lot of good stuff the oldies recall from those years, such as Richards (and Glenn Seton) driving the Skyline in the wet around the top of Mount Panorama — on slicks. Actually 'driving' is probably not the right word, it was more like manhandling.
However, current V8 Supercar fans probably weren't even born when Jim Richards famously vented at an unforgiving crowd of booze-fuelled fans while he stood on the podium at Bathurst, back in 1992.
"That was Jim [Richards] saying that in the heat of the moment," said Ian Moreillon, Nissan Australia's Executive GM, National Sales and Fleet. "That will go down in folklore, that comment — it HAS gone down in folklore...
"I remember that live, I watched it on television... The people who don't remember that... it doesn't matter, they see us coming in and stirring the pot with Holden and Ford."
For his part, Nissan's General Manager of Media Enquiries, Jeff Fisher, reckons the spectacle of Richards and Skaife expressing their anger at the Bathurst yobbos is largely forgotten and irrelevant moving forward.
"If it adds a bit of spice to the racing, so be it — and that'll be an exciting thing for V8 Supercars. But... it's where they're going in the future [that counts].
"If 2013 and Car of the Future had never happened, then we would have never considered it, but it's because they're reinventing themselves, it's because new technologies are coming along — and it works for us as well — that there's a natural marriage there."
The TV viewing audience (and those who actually attend races around the country) are not the brand-loyal fans they once were. They're more likely to follow drivers and teams than models of cars. That's the anecdotal evidence, at least. So fans may follow the Kelly brothers rather than Nissan. Moreillon feels that, if anything, willingness to follow a driver or a team from one camp to another may help Nissan.
"We really do believe that Todd and Rick [Kelly] can very successfully move into driving a Nissan — and people will follow the driver. They're two guys that are impeccable in every way and we think they'll engage the Nissan brand and run with it — and engage all of the fans with it as well."
So Nissan seems to have a lot riding on the Kellys; it's the beginning of a chain reaction of sorts. Fans follow the Kellys and, by association they begin to support the Nissan brand. Over a period of time that enthusiasm for the brand at the racetrack could convert buyers in the showrooms — the old win on Sunday, sell on Monday philosophy. And in the short term, it is presumably a cornerstone of marketing Nissan's new large car, if and when it arrives in Australian showrooms.
That dependence on the Kellys may be why Nissan is not admitting to either an exclusive agreement with them or a willingness to entertain support for another team, should a second team want to campaign V8 Supercar races in Nissan livery.
"At this stage the focus is purely Kelly [Racing] — 100 per cent. What happens in the years to come, we'll see..." replied Thompson. "We're confident that that's the team that will take us to success."
"They've made the investment into the future [and have] the capabilities and professionalism..."
And Nissan has put behind it earlier controversy when the company cancelled a sponsorship deal with the V8 Supercars organising body. As Geoffrey Harris wrote at the time, the Nissan brand image somehow became entangled with a safety car on one hand — and a known contributor to the road toll on the other. Since Nissan's involvement in the series doesn't relate to a safety car, the association with a brand of alcohol — Jack Daniels — as a major sponsor of Kelly Racing, ceases to be a concern to the company.
"JD stays as principal sponsor and we are fortunate to be partnering such a professional and responsible team partner," was Fisher's official response, when motoring.com.au asked about that.
It's a sign of the trust Nissan and the Kelly team share — and is further evidence to support Thompson's remarks that Nissan presently has no intentions of approaching other teams to run the company's products in the race series.
However, having multiple teams in Nissan-branded cars could multiply the chances of race wins — particularly important in the event that a fourth or even a fifth manufacturer might join the circus, as Chairman of V8 Supercars Development, Mark Skaife, told the media during the press conference.
"Bring it on..." was Thompson's response to that. "We compete with 64 other brands, every day of the year, out on the road. So four or five..."
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