Sorry if we list Datsun cars under the Nissan name. But it always was one and the same car manufacturer, so we did not want to split them in two. Datsun is the oldest Japanese car maker, founded in 1914 and existing i.e. more than 20 years before Toyota. The company was originally founded by 3 people: Kenjiro Den, Rokuro Aoyama & Meitaro Takeuchi. Take the first letters of these gentlemen's surnames and add the Japanese flag symbol, the red "sun" and out comes Datsun. However it appeared here we have a car manufacturer financially struggling throughout its existence. In the mid 1930s, when most other Japanese car manufacturers were founded, Datsun fell under full ownership of Nissan. Nissan itself is an abbreviation for Nippon Sangyo, a company that produced automotive equipment and electronics and is also mother to Hitachi. When in 1983 Datsun was renamed to Nissan, this was solely a change of marketing name, Datsun was Nissan owned since 50 years! The reason for this move was again financial problems, followed by an attempt to change brand image. It didn't help much, in 1999 Nissan fell under Renault ownership.
In rallying Nissan/Datsun is the first Japanese make to come out with a true in house rally program (in 1969). And they are distinctively different to their Japanese opposition as not only was Nissan/Datsun first, they were run out of Japan and they didn’t need persuading by a European rally driver to take on rallying. If you look into the rally history of i.e. Toyota, Mitsubishi and Mazda, you find that Nissan really is the exception in Japanese attitude, at least in this respect.
Maybe at this time there was split personality within the Japanese works team Nismo (= Nissan Motorsport). Reflecting on the Silvia 240RS, Nissan surprised the whole rally world for being the first manufacturer to show a full house groupS rally car, the 300ZX based mid-engined 4-wheel-drive 4-wheel-steering MID4. However when groupS was cancelled and groupA came, the heavy RWD Silvia 200SX could once again only have been with African adventure rallies in mind.
Nissan’s attitude only turned away from Safari specials to full scale WRC in the early 1990s. The dead born groupS car aside, their first and in fact only car clearly designed to win the whole championship was the groupA 4x4 turbo Sunny GTI-R, launched in 1991. Interestingly only then Nissan’s operation turned away from Japan to a business based at Didcot, GB and run by former star navigator Dave Whittock and conveniently named NME (= Nissan Motorsport Europe). This project however was hugely embarrassing. Not only was reliability a major issue, but for its performance and being group A a big problem of the road car version of the Sunny GTI-R became very apparent: for some reason the intercooler was placed above the engine and exhaust manifold, the hottest place in the engine bay, such it acted more as an interwarmer. This meant performance was a problem and because of groupA the engineers were not allowed to move the intercooler. A funny side effect of this was that to improve the under bonnet air circulation Nissan was running on all events even at full daylight always with the full light pod fitted.
But as you can read the nissan rally experience wasen't to bad, because gives us a sr20det road version for the owners of niisan Pulsar gti-r, nissan b13, u13, plataforms and of course the rwd version on nissan silvias s13, s14, and s15, the awd technologies call ATTESA for nissan, the NISMO division and all his weapon from the nissan march s-tune version (call nissan micra here in México) to the ultimate nissan gt-r nismo version, so rally for nissan in some way was no complete understand on that years, in others meanings is not a completed fail, is more like grow up, and be ready for the future, I hope personally nissan returns a full WRC program under the new spec for the incoming years.
Here its a very nice example whats is NISMO for a nissan fanatic, and the WRC legacy, enjoy it!
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