For a team that nobody really expected to win at Le Mans,->ke1591 Nissan->ke62 sure got a lot of attention this year. But that's pretty understandable, as Nissan's LMP1 car, the 2015 Nissan GT-R LM Nismo, is pure lunacy on wheels. The front-engine and front-wheel-drive machine is unlike anything else that was competing at La Sarthe. The car is still very much a work in progress, so where it finished in the race wasn't as important as it just making it the full 24 hours, which it did manage to do. Good thing too, because it was very, very slow compared to all of the other LMP1 cars, and even a lot of the LMP2 and LMGTE cars.

What was most perplexing to most racing->ke447 fans though, was the question of what it must be like to try and drive something with such an insanely long hood on a racetrack, especially one as crowed as this. The video->ke278 here shows some in-car footage of the GT-R LM Nismo being driven at Le Mans at dusk, and it certainly doesn't look easy. It's not the first racecar->ke148 to offer poor visibility, but it's still something you have to see to believe.

2015 Nissan GT-R LM Nismo

The name of Nissan's prototype racer is a bit confusing. It's not immediately obvious what it could possibly have in common with the GT-R->ke1592 road car from which it takes its name. But the answer is under the weirdly long hood, where the car is powered by the same 3.0-liter twin-turbo V6 as the road car. But unlike the road car, the racecar is front-wheel-drive, something basically unheard of in this area of motorsports.

Engines aren't usually located in front of the cockpit either, but this isn't quite as rare, with the last front-engine LMP car being the Panoz LMP-1 Roadster-S which competed from 1999 through 2003. The GT-R LM Nismo is technically a hybrid,->ke147 but this wasn't really used to anything like its full potential during the race. The car is only 8 months old, and this factors in even more with a car that is so radically different from everything else. It will be very interesting to see how the car does in the future.

Read our full review here.