Pressure tests

Testing began with the car and crew at the All American Racers (AAR) factory in Santa Ana, California. Things were coming together quite late, many problems hadn’t found their solution and many more complexities of working within the LMP-H class were only just starting to become apparent.

Early on in budget negotiations in 2013, Nissan had insisted on three cars at Le Mans. This was to later stress our operation to the max. The car’s designer, Ben Bowlby, was in Europe and flew from the FIA in Paris to Cosworth in Northampton, UK in late September 2014. From there he drove to Flybrid in Silverstone and then flew back to AAR in California carrying a new transmission case, cast with rapid prototyped tooling in the USA. Then it was back to Xtrac, near Donington, UK for main-case machining. He waited there for the gearbox to be built, and then travelled back to Cosworth to consider the assembly of engine, gearbox and cooling system on its dyno.

Late October found him flying to Japan to visit Nismo with Motorsport Europe racing director, Darren Cox, and then returning to California, the long way round via Cosworth and Flybrid again. Ben isn’t your usual company head. He’s very hands on and hard to keep up with at all levels.

Meanwhile, back at the California workshop, the first chassis was being built early in November, initially with an aluminium gearbox case that was quite heavy, though the magnesium version would follow up.

The choice of business partners was obviously not based on geography. Torotrak, Xtrac, Cosworth, TotalSim and Racetech Harnessing were all 10,000 miles and an eight-hour time shift from California. But our group had been designing and making IndyCars, Champ Cars and Sportscars in America with these transatlantic relationships for years. For us, the UK still offered the