Nissan Motorsport has fitted new braking systems to the 350Z entries of Gary Formato and Duncan Vos ahead of this weekend’s rounds of the Sahara Production Car championship at Kyalami.
Nissan Motorsport has fitted new braking systems to the 350Z entries of Gary Formato and Duncan Vos ahead of this weekend’s rounds of the Sahara Production Car championship at Kyalami.
Apart from Formato’s win in the 350Z’s third race meeting at Phakisa, the team has racked up five top-three finishes and four pole positions (three by Formato and one by Vos), since February.
“We’ve made encouraging progress since our first appearance at Kyalami four months ago,” Nissan Motorsport boss Glyn Hall said this week. “We started with a considerable weight disadvantage over our competitors because of our superior rated horsepower in standard production form – and this has had a major effect on the efficiency of our braking and grip out of corners.
“We’ve worked hard to counter this and have enjoyed some success on those circuits where we were able to put the power on the road, achieve the grip we needed and compete on a more equal footing weight-wise with our competitors,” he added.
Hall revealed that efficient braking had been the team’s biggest challenge: “The standard ABS system was not designed to cope with the power to added weight ratio and, while the ABS is still under development, we’ve switched to a manual system.
“This is not ideal, but based on what we learnt during the last races at Port Elizabeth’s Aldo Scribante circuit in May we have now fitted new competition brakes,” he added.
Formato lies a close third in the class A championship after four of the 10 rounds with 73 points, five points behind BMW’s Hennie Groenewald and 43 behind Groenewald’s team-mate, reigning champion Anthony Taylor. Vos is fifth with 48 points.