When Nissan developed the GT-R to defeat the Ford Sierra Cosworth RS500, it’s fair to say the Japanese team at NISMO never expected an operation from Australia to come up with the ultimate touring car, but it did. While the Ford Sierra Cosworth RS500 and BMW E30 M3 emerged as dominant forces in touring car racing approaching the 1990s, there was one model still to come to continue the technological advancement.
NISMO’s Sierra-beater was revealed in 1989 and proved promising straight away, but the journey for Gibson Motorsport was tough in Australia. To aid in curing the reliability problems, Australian team manager of Nissan’s UK-based Group C sports car program Alan Heaphy was drafted in to review the Gibson Motorsport operation post-Bathurst 1990. “When I arrived, I think at the end of November, I went straight to New Zealand where the team was racing at the Wellington street race and it was a good opportunity to see some of the problems the car had. The car was suffering badly with brake issues, not so much the handling, and there were other components that were just underdone,” Heaphy recalled.
Already by this early stage in the program Gibson Motorsport’s team of engineers had developed evolution components after finding many of the Japanese equivalents not suited to Australian race tracks. “They had their own front and rear uprights that were locally made, wishbones and a number of other components that were made in-house. They also had the Holinger gearbox that replaced the NISMO gearbox as they found it to be unreliable.”
A major breakthrough for the team was the PI system Heaphy returned to Australia with, as it provided valuable data to aid in experimentation. “With the PI system in the car and the data we got from turbo speeds, brake temperatures and other items, we could basically say, ‘change this, check that, and do that’,” Heaphy explained. “We spent almost every day bar Christmas Day modifying bits and pieces in the workshop to get the car up and running to go testing: brakes, oil coolers, and that sort of thing. The development was just a vertical line, it really was.”
Another major development was the turbochargers built in-house, and a trip to NISMO’s headquarters in Japan revealed how far advanced the Australian operations were. “Myself and two other team guys went to Japan, and they had an engineering guy from Garrett at NISMO at the time we were there. He looked at that turbocharger, pulled it apart and reckoned our guys were two years in front of them with development work. We had a 360 thrust-bearing turbo and we had a balancing machine that used to suck the air out of everything, and the guys could run and balance them up to about 120–130,000rpm.”
In the end few NISMO components remained as the GT-R took all before it in 1991, cleaning up the ATCC with Richards, the ‘privateer’ Bob Forbes GIO entry taking the Sandown 500, and Nissan Australia achieving their long-time goal of winning the Bathurst 1000. Not to mention second in the Nissan Mobil 500 for Richards and Skaife, including victory at the Pukekohe round.
And with that, Heaphy was sent back to Europe to work on Nissan’s British Touring Car Championship program being run by Janspeed. Despite restrictions being placed on the now Winfield-supported Skyline GT-Rs for 1992, success continued with Skaife winning the title, and Richards claiming a controversial Bathurst victory in the second shortened 1000 in its history.