Last year was a banner season for Nissan in SUPER GT. As well as winning the GT500 crown that had eluded him since 2015 in the brand new Z, he locked down the top two in the drivers’ standings and won the GT300 title to boot.
In fact, almost every team in the Nissan GT500 stable had something to celebrate last year. But for the No. 23 NISMO crew of Ronnie Quintarelli and Tsugio Matsuda, the drivers who delivered Nissan’s previous GT500 successes in 2014-15, it was a season to forget.
The old veterans were overtaken by the No. 3 sister car of Katsumasa Chiyo and Mitsunori Takaboshi as NISMO expanded to two cars and failed to win a race all season. While Quintarelli took pole at Suzuka, in terms of race results, second at Sugo was just as good for the pair. And this was a race that he and Matsuda should have won if not for an unfortunate strategy error that gave Chiyo and Takaboshi the win.
Main contender Nissan, the car whose status is tied to the fact that its number plate says “Ni-san”, was very humble. But attention has now turned to how Quintarelli and Matsuda can win again in their 10th season as teammates.
“We’ve been trying to get the No. 23 car back to where it was two or three years ago, back to being a solid team,” Quintarelli says. “During the off-season, NISMO has been working on the No. 23 side of the garage and I can feel the atmosphere [of old] coming back again
“During these tests I felt the atmosphere coming back and we had quite solid tests. I saw that the motivation within the team is very good. We still need to improve the small details, but the motivation is there and that’s the point most important thing I heard from the tests.”
Looking back at what went wrong last year, Quintarelli points to NISMO’s expansion to a second car and the tragic loss of team principal Yutaka Suzuki just months before the 2022 season began as contributing factors. the struggles of crew number 23.
“Losing [Suzuki] it was a big hit,” Quintarelli says. “And going from running one car to running two cars is a big difference. What works well in one car may not work in the other. Especially at the beginning of the season, there was a lot of pressure with the new car and things didn’t go as well as in the past.”
There is also the question of whether the new format team number 3 it was maybe more energized that their numbers opposite number 23 side of the garage that have been working together for a long time.
“I really appreciate the effort that NISMO has made to try to change some ‘parts’ to improve things within the team, especially in terms of motivation,” says the Italian. “When you have two drivers who have been together for 10 years, plus the chief engineer [Takeshi Nakajima], sometimes you can get flat. You need some spark in the team.
“It seems that now we are not the ‘ace’ car within NISMO, we only have the ‘ace’ number, but according to the results of last year, it is not the case that we are the aces. Even this point is motivating.
“For them [the #3] it was a new challenge, naturally they were very motivated. They had nothing to lose: if they were behind us, it was normal.”
Quintarelli also admits the No.23 side of the garage hit a dead end during preparation, influenced by his extensive knowledge of how to get the most out of the old GT-R, allowing the fresher No.3 crew to take over of them. .
“When we switched to the Z we started with a similar setup to the GT-R,” he explains. “Car #3 started from scratch with a new set-up concept and we were working in completely different ways.
“In pre-season testing, when the conditions are cool and you have good downforce, it looked pretty good. But I would say from round 3 [at Suzuka], when we had a warmer weekend, we realized we weren’t competitive enough. We started to fight a lot, and the number 3 car was clearly faster than us. That was the story of the season.”
NISMO has run four off-season tests so far, joining group tests at Suzuka and Fuji before testing just its two cars at Michelin-run tests at Motegi and Okayama.
The two red Nissans were the only GT500 cars missing from last week’s two days of manufacturer testing at Suzuka, where Toshiki Oyu’s ARTA Honda set an ominous marker with a new unofficial track record of around 1 .5 seconds over the existing reference point.
Quintarelli jokes that “we weren’t doing such fast times in Formula Nippon [now Super Formula] 15 years ago!” But he adds that with aerodynamics frozen this season, he’s not overly concerned about whether Honda has gotten the jump on Nissan over the winter.
“I don’t know exactly how to judge it, because the most important thing this year is carbon-neutral fuel, which has an impact on engine power,” he notes. “Since the GTA test in Okayama, all the cars have had to use the new fuel, but so far there have been cars on regular fuel and that’s a plus.
“Using CNF, you lose power. From the first time we used it, it wasn’t that bad, but you could feel the power loss. We have to optimize how the engine works with the new CNF.
“Honda seems to be very fast, but I don’t think they’ve improved by 1.5 seconds! We won’t know for sure until the official test in Okayama, where everyone will have the new fuel and everyone will be running under the same conditions. So let’s go see there.”
