Welcome to Part 3 of DSC’s GT500 season preview, covering the Nissan runners. Click these links if you’ve missed Parts 1 (Lexus) and 2 (Honda).

2017 was almost a year where Nissan basked in the glory of another championship for the flagship Nissan Motorsport (NISMO) team, who put together a consistent season, and improved dramatically in the second half of the year, winning the last race of the season at Twin Ring Motegi and finishing a close second in the championship to Lexus and team KeePer TOM’s.

But were it not for the performance of the NISMO team, and their victory at Motegi, 2017 could have been a disaster for Nissan. The Motegi win was all that stopped them from their first winless season since 2002. The other three Nissan GT500 teams combined to score just one pole position and one podium last year. It was not a year that was up to par by the standards that Nissan had set in the first three years of this current two-litre turbo era of GT500, be it their back-to-back titles in 2014 & 2015, or their history-making run of four straight wins to open the 2016 season.

That simply won’t suffice, not for Takao Katagiri, the President & CEO of NISMO, not for project leader Toshikazu Tanaka, not for the all-star teams and drivers in the GT500 fleet, and not for Nissan’s growing base of Super GT supporters both back home in Japan, and across the world.

The Nissan GT-R NISMO GT500 has been reworked for 2018. Improved centerline aero, improved driveability, and, to solve their biggest weakness early last year, more efficiency and power from their NR20A powerplant. With Team Impul and Kondo Racing leading three of the eight pre-season test sessions at Okayama and Fuji, Nissan are well ahead of where they are this year.

The structure of the teams and drivers is also heavily revised, apart from only the flagship NISMO team. There’s an even mixture of proven veteran champions, and young, hungry drivers all eager for their first premier-class successes in Super GT.

Of the big three Japanese manufacturers in Super GT, Nissan have more wins and more championships to their name than any other, and this is how they’ll line up for the 2018 season:

#3 | NDDP Racing with B-Max | CraftSports Motul GT-R | Michelin | Satoshi Motoyama & Katsumasa Chiyo

The 2018 season sees the GT500 debut of NDDP Racing with B-Max, who step up from GT300 to take the place of MOLA.

NDDP Racing were Nissan’s de-facto works programme for the GT300 class, named for Nissan’s home-grown driver development system that graduated the likes of Katsumasa Chiyo, Yuhi Sekiguchi, Daiki Sasaki, and most recently Mitsunori Takaboshi to the top of Super GT.

At the helm of the operation is a Nissan racing legend, Masahiro Hasemi, a championship-winning driver across a number of categories, and previously the owner of Hasemi Motor Sports, who won two championships in GT300 before shutting down. With Hasemi’s leadership and the team carrying his traditional number 3, NDDP Racing are a continuation of the Hasemi Motor Sports legacy.

And in everything but name only, this is effectively NISMO’s second car, similar liveries, similar sponsorships, and an exclusive partnership with Michelin between NISMO and NDDP Racing which carries over from the MOLA operation.

With this new structure behind them, the driver lineup of Satoshi Motoyama and Katsumasa Chiyo remains unchanged from the changeover from MOLA to NDDP Racing.

Motoyama is about to start his 22nd consecutive season as a GT500 driver, making him the most experienced premier-class competitor of all-time. Between his three GT500 championships and 16 race victories, and the four championships he won in Super Formula, the 47-year-old Motoyama has now built a legacy to match that of his mentor Kazuyoshi Hoshino.

Even in the twilight of his racing career, Motoyama still has the competitive fire to be a champion. That flame sparked up again last July in the final corners of the final lap at Sportsland SUGO, where Motoyama and Kohei Hirate clashed, wheel-to-wheel, for the victory in a dramatic finish to a compelling race. Motoyama may not have taken his team to victory, but he demonstrated that he isn’t ready to go quietly into the sunset just yet.

As his great rivals like Juichi Wakisaka and Daisuke Ito have stepped from the cockpit to the directors’ seat, Motoyama still feels like he can win a fourth GT500 title that’s been eluding him for over a decade – and if this season does prove in time to be his final run in GT500, he’s determined to end it on top.

Just as hungry to succeed in 2018 is Katsumasa Chiyo, whose career comes full-circle with NDDP Racing, the team for whom he debuted in GT300 back in 2012. In fact, when the Nissan Driver Development Programme launched in 2007, Chiyo was the first driver to enter the system.

2018 is a big year for Chiyo, who exploded into the consciousness of the international endurance racing scene three years ago. His late-race heroics at the Bathurst 12 Hour in 2015 & 2016 are still the stuff of Mount Panorama legend. He is still the only Japanese driver to win a major European sports car racing title, also in 2015.

In two prior seasons, Chiyo has come close to a breakthrough victory, as close as that thrilling near-miss at Sugo last July, even. But now in year three, and at 31 years old, this is a year where Chiyo knows that he has to deliver on what was expected when he first arrived in GT500 in 2016. The speed has been there, all he needs now is a little luck, and once Chiyo wins his first race, it could open the floodgates.

Motoyama and Chiyo have good chemistry which extends to single-seaters as well: Chiyo is making his Super Formula debut in 2018 for B-Max Racing, hand-picked by Motoyama, their new team principal.

On paper, Motoyama and Chiyo are an all-star Nissan racing tandem, and have been for the last two seasons. With new leadership to guide them, and a mutual desire for success, 2018 could be a big, big year for NDDP Racing, perhaps one that could mirror the back-to-back titles that MOLA won when they stepped up from GT300.

#12 | Team Impul | Calsonic Impul GT-R | Bridgestone | Daiki Sasaki & Jann Mardenborough

2018 is an important year for Team Impul’s evergreen, or in this case, everblue, title sponsor Calsonic, the 80th anniversary of their founding.

And it’s also an important year for Team Impul, who’ve been a part of Super GT since the very first season in 1994, who were the first back-to-back GT500 champions in 1994 & 1995, following up where their Group A touring car dynasty left off. But it’s now been over 22 years since the Calsonic Nissan last won the GT500 title, and in 2017, they slipped further away from contention, with only one top-5 finish in a luckless season.

To revive the fortunes of his legendary squad, team director Kazuyoshi Hoshino will have two incredibly talented 26-year-old drivers to work with: Jann Mardenborough, and newcomer Daiki Sasaki. They are two drivers who’ve taken entirely different roads to converge to one point, to represent Nissan at the highest level of GT racing, in the most storied and iconic GT500 car on the grid.

By now, you know the story of how Mardenborough went from Gran Turismo gamer, to GT Academy champion, to factory Nissan racing driver.

In his second GT500 campaign and his seventh year as a real-life racing driver, “Jann the Man” is now more professional racer than former gamer. The step up to GT500 was a much-anticipated one for the young Welshman, and in the legendary Calsonic GT-R no less, the same car he would have been playing in Gran Turismo as a youth.

Last October in Thailand could have been the scene of Mardenborough’s first win or podium in GT500, until a late-race mechanical failure ripped it away from the team in the final laps. That was just the kind of misfortune Team Impul endured as a whole in 2017. Then again, Mardenborough has persevered through adversity in his young career, a traumatic accident and a lost LMP1 season in 2015, and the loss of his Super Formula drive this off-season, for starters.

Though Mardenborough’s pace was undone by poor results and spats of bad luck last year, he feels very good about 2018, and about the reworked GT-R: “It’s a big improvement over last year’s car and after every test we’ve come away knowing what tires we want to run from Bridgestone. Our speed has been really strong and we’ve been towards the top of the timesheets in the past couple of weeks. I’m really hyped for round one and can’t wait to get to Okayama. I feel really good about the season ahead.”

Like Mardenborough, Daiki Sasaki is a young driver developed by Nissan, though unlike his new co-driver, Sasaki did climb the more conventional road to GT500.

His road to the top came through a decorated karting career into the Japanese-based Nissan Driver Development Programme (NDDP), winning a Formula 3 N-Class title in 2012, making his Super GT debut the same year, then stepping up to GT500 in 2014, and winning his first race in 2015.

After spending the first four seasons of his GT500 tenure with Kondo Racing, Sasaki moves now to Team Impul, switching from Yokohama to Bridgestone tyres. And the Saitama native has been one of the headline-grabbers in pre-season testing, regularly running at or near the top of the timesheets. In his time with Kondo, the young man nicknamed “The Wolf” developed a reputation as one of Super GT’s best late-race “closers”.

Two young, explosively talented drivers, driving for a fiery, legendary former racer who expects 100% commitment and success. If two P1 finishes in pre-season test sessions are an indicator, this could be the perfect combination that not only gets Calsonic Team Impul back to winning races, but ends a drought of 23 years without a championship for the most famous car in Super GT.

#23 | NISMO | Motul Autech GT-R | Michelin | Tsugio Matsuda & Ronnie Quintarelli

By the time it hits the track in Okayama, the “Red Car” will be back in its regular bright red colours. And as is the case every season, NISMO are entering another season as one of the teams to beat in Super GT, the winningest organisation with the two winningest drivers of all-time.

The #23 car was the sole standout performer from a difficult 2017 season from Nissan on the whole, consistently picking up points and driving above the car’s performance envelope when the GT-R lacked horsepower, and racking up a win and two more second-place finishes in the second-half of the season to narrowly miss the championship by two points.

There’s an argument, and a good one at that, to be made that last year, and not the back-to-back championships in 2014 & 2015, cemented the legacy of Tsugio Matsuda and Ronnie Quintarelli.

The men who drive the #23 Motul GT-R are the most successful two drivers to ever grid up in the same Super GT car, in the 25-year history of the series. The GT500 equivalent of Kristensen & Capello at Audi a generation ago, of Ickx & Bell some time before them.

With the win at Motegi last November, Matsuda took back sole posession of #1 on the all-time GT500 wins list with career victory number 19 – he’s now one away from an unprecedented 20. Quintarelli, already the first-ever four-time GT500 champion, broke a three-way deadlock with Ralph Firman and Benoît Tréluyer to become the winningest foreign driver in Super GT history.

“We’ve been teammates for so long,” said Quintarelli, of his working relationship with Matsuda. “I think over time the relationship has improved for the better and we are on the best terms now. We won the title in 2014 and 2015, and we were almost there in ’16 and ’17, so we know we can do it. Along with Tsugio, and the whole team, we’re going to work very hard to try and bring that win home.”

As for the car, Quintarelli, liked Mardenborough, expressed optimism over the revisions to the new GT-R: “Aerodynamically, the car has changed in a few key areas, and we are confident we have made a good step forward. Under Super GT regulations, we can only use two engines throughout the entire year, but our engine guys have also worked hard on improvements too.”

“In the Sepang tests, we tried the new aerodynamics, and the car felt much better to drive under hard-braking corners,” said Quintarelli. “In Japan, we finalized the car set up based on new aerodynamic spec and are happy about the base we have now. I’m very motivated for the year ahead. Tsugio and I are going to give it our best shot, and my target is to chase down my fifth Super GT title.”

Individually, Matsuda and Quintarelli are all-time greats just on the strength of their career accolades in Japan. As a unit, Matsuda, Quintarelli, and team principal Yutaka Suzuki, who’s overseen the team since 2010, are almost without peer, even in such a closely-fought championship.

Don’t read too much into their pre-season testing results, for NISMO have a game plan in place that’ll kick in once the season starts. The drivers are still in their prime. The personnel is the same as last year. The Michelin tyres they share only with NDDP Racing are grippy, durable, and built specifically to suit the GT-R.

And while it’s way too early to call a champion just yet, if one considers what this team was able to do when the car wasn’t as quick as those of their peers around them, then imagine what NISMO could do in 2018, where they enter the season with a much more competitive package than last year?

There’s a very good feeling heading into 2018 that Matsuda, Quintarelli, and NISMO can win the third championship in a five-year span, the one that they nearly won the last two years running, that would make them the greatest squad in Super GT history, bar none.

#24 | Kondo Racing | Forum Engineering Advan GT-R | Yokohama | João Paulo de Oliveira & Mitsunori Takaboshi

No team felt the brunt of Nissan’s early-to-mid season struggles like Kondo Racing. Apart from a top-five finish at the Suzuka 1000km from pole position, they were virtually a non-factor all season.

The car didn’t work well with the Yokohama tyres, which had been so good to them in 2016, but didn’t have the same race pace in 2017. They were also very, very unlucky at times. And it wasn’t really the fault of anyone at the team of course, but given the excitement around Daiki Sasaki and J.P. Oliveira when the lineup was announced last season, there was reason to feel like 2017 represented multiple steps back for Masahiko “Matchy” Kondo and his team.

Sasaki has moved on, of course, but his place at the team is taken by yet another Nissan young driver making his full-time GT500 debut, Mitsunori Takaboshi, 25 years old from Saitama, Japan.

We’ve mentioned the successes of NDDP alumni like Chiyo and Sasaki, but if you ask those close to the paddock, they’ll tell you that of all of Nissan’s home-grown young drivers to hit the scene in the last decade, Takaboshi may be the best pure talent they’ve ever produced.

Takaboshi is the first driver to ever win both the main and N-Class All-Japan Formula 3 Championships, winning the latter in 2013, then coming back four years later to hold off Sho Tsuboi for the big prize a year ago. He was a two-time race winner in his GT300 rookie season in 2015. Like Chiyo before him, he did a year with NISMO Team RJN in Blancpain GT in 2016. That same year, filling in for an injured Chiyo, he scored a podium finish on his GT500 debut, at the Suzuka 1000km, no less.

Nissan have rewarded his outstanding potential, not just with his first full-time GT500 drive at Kondo Racing, but with a Formula E test as Nissan and NISMO prepare to enter the electric racing series in 2018-19 – which indicates that Nissan may still have ambitions of seeing Takaboshi succeed on an international stage in short order.

In the first day of testing at Fuji, Takaboshi scored the fastest lap of the day, justifying his talents before the season even gets underway. In Brazilian veteran J.P. Oliveira, he’ll work with one of the best GT500 drivers of all-time.

Oliveira surpassed 100 career races last season, entering his 13th campaign, all in a Nissan GT500 car. The fiery Brazilian has tempered his cutthroat aggression on-track in recent years, but as his pole run at Suzuka last season shows, he isn’t even entertaining the thought of slowing down. In fact, he’s still very much in the prime of his career.

Which is why, now more than ever, Oliveira is motivated to add the one missing piece to his racing career that’s eluded him for most of 13 seasons: His very first GT500 championship, one to match the Super Formula title he won in 2010, and the All-Japan F3 title five years before that, and his 9 career GT500 wins which, for now, make him the most successful GT500 driver to never win the ultimate prize.

Oliveira went back to his native Brazil for a run in the Stock Car Championship season-opener at Interlagos this March, and won with co-driver Daniel Serra – so JP is already off to a good start in 2018. With his new co-driver Takaboshi, Oliveira is once again ready to finally capture that elusive first title.

All photos courtesy of NISMO