More than a few racing drivers have been accused of not using their wing mirrors (Cough. Pastor Maldonado. Cough), but Nissan will make history at this weekend's Le Mans 24 hours when it races a car specifically designed to run without them.
The ZEOD RC race car would be revolutionary enough without shunning conventional mirrors. It's a half-electric, half turbocharged petrol racer that Nissan's NISMO motorsport arm hopes will be able to complete several laps at full (and competitive) racing speed under pure battery power. Based on last year's stunning Delta Wing racer, it's pure sci-fi brought to the race track.
Part of that cutting edge package is the absence of mirrors. Wing mirrors actually cause quite a bit of drag, certainly on a conventional road model, and many a concept car has done away with them in favour of interior screens showing a rear-facing camera feed. The aerodynamic benefits for a car that's expected to top 300km/h down the Mulsanne straight are obvious. The technology is yet to fully mature for road car use, but hopefully Nissan's use of it at Le Mans will speed that process up a touch. Forged in the white heat of competition and all that.
It's not just a camera system though. Nissan says that not only do the cameras offer a wider field of vision than conventional mirrors but there's also a built-in radar system to warn the driver when another car is approaching from behind. With the huge closing speeds between vehicles at Le Mans, thanks to hugely fast LMP1 and LMP2 prototypes mixing it with road-based GT cars, that could well be truly life-saving tech, and the experience of racing with it will feed back into Nissan's road-going Safety Shield technology, which includes radar-based collision warning systems, as currently available on the Note and Qashqai.
"These driver assist systems are just another aspect of future technology transfers that will improve the road cars of the future," said NISMO's Global Head of Brand, Marketing & Sales, Darren Cox. "The development of the battery technology will obviously assist the development of future versions of the Nissan LEAF and other hybrid models, but lessons learned from the driver assist systems will find their way into every Nissan model in the future. If we have a system which can provide safe and important information at 300km/h in a high pressure situation, then we can adapt that for use in road cars. One of the reasons why we race is that motorsport helps our engineers to really fast track technologies and test them in extreme environments. There is no event or competition more extreme than the Le Mans 24 Hours."
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The ZEOD RC is running in Le Mans under the Garage 56 rules - specially designed to let far-reaching cars using futuristic technology to race against more mundane machines. Its racing performance will be used to help develop Nissan's dramatic Bladeglider concept car for sale.