Nissan's motorsport history begins right here.
In June 1936 Japan's first permanant race track was opened.
The Tamagawa Speedway was located on the banks of the Tama river near Tokyo
and was a 1200m oval track. This naturally attracted a lot of interest,
and car importers, backyard enthusiasts and Japanese car makers all looked
on with great interest.
In 1936 the car industry in Japan was in it's infancy. The
single biggest success story in the industry at the time was Nissan, who
by that stage were the biggest car manufacturer in the country. Morale
was high at the time, with Nissan workers proud of what their company was
achieveing. To build on this pride a group of Nissan workers and engineers
decided to build their own race car.
A small corner of Nissan's new factory was set aside for the project, where
the first car, the Nissan NL75 was built. The people who designed and built
this car did so voluntarily in their own time, and the car was completed
in only three months from the start of the project. Three months is an
impressive effort for a group of people working in their spare time, but
the feat was even more astonishing when you realise that the designs they
were working on were groundbreaking for an Asian manufacturer, with some
highly advanced technology being used.
The NL75 was based on the chassis of the 1935 Datsun 14 production
car. The road-going Datsun 14 featured the new Type 7 four cylinder 722cc
side valve engine that produced 16hp, but for some reason they decided
to fit the NL-75 with an engine based on the old 747cc DAT engine that
was last used in the Datsun 13. It is unclear whether this decision was
made thanks to a desire to utilise some of the older engines or whether
it had to do with the slightly larger capacity of the old DAT engine. The
engineers used only the lower section of the engine and not the cylinder
head, because they had something rather interesting in mind for to top
of the engine. What they did was to design a double overhead cam cylinder
head to use on the DAT engine block.  This
was cutting edge technology in 1936, whith only the likes of Isotta Fraschini,
Bugatti and Maserati using DOHC designs for their Grand Prix cars at the
time, and certainly not something you would expect to see on a pre-war
Asian race car built in someone's spare time. It would be thirty years
before OHC technology reached a Datsun production car with the 130 series
Cedric in 1966. The engine featured two valves per cylinder, with the valves
cantered at about 20deg. Not only did the car have an impressive head design,
it also had a Rootes type supercharger which also appears to have been
built in-house. There is some confusion as to the output of the engine,
with various figures quoted relating to the pressure the supercharger was
set at, but the car seems to have raced with something around 42hp.
The car used the same chassis as the Datsun 14, which was
a fairly basic ladder chassis. Suspension was semi-eliptical leaf springs
front and back, but the steering system was different to the sedan, with
the wheel operating a lever arm on the side of the car which then moved
a rod that ran almost parallel to the chassis, which then operated the
swivel axles. The whole setup is similar to that used on speedway cars.
The NL-75 was a single seat race car, it's body was a steel
construction made of hand beaten sheet metal. It looked like a minature
version of a Grand Prix car from that era, or rather like a more modern
speedway car.
At around the same time a different car was built called
the NL-76. The NL-76 was a very different car and was designed to race
in a production based category. The NL-76 was nowhere near as adventurous
in it's mechanical design as the NL-75. It too was based on the Datsun
14, and it continued to use the 14's chassis and suspension. The steering
on this car was closer to the design of the road car than the NL-75, with
it's componantry located within the bodywork. This model did not have either
the twin cam cylinder head or the supercharger of the NL-75, and nor was
it based on the same engine. The NL-76 used a worked version of the new
722cc Datsun Type 7 engine, which had only just been fitted to the new
Datsun 14 sedan. The Type 7 engine as fitted to the Datsun 14 produced
15hp, and in the Datsun 15 of 1936 it's output had increased to 16hp, the
work done on the NL-76's engine raised the output to 22hp.
The body of the NL-76 was significantly different to that of the NL-75.
The NL-76 had a much shorter nose section than the NL-75, with a much more
vertical grille. The rear of the NL-75 featured an incorporated headrest
behind the driver which offered some form of roll-over protection, the
NL-76 offered no such protection, and at the back of the car the bodywork
tapered away rapidly behind the cabin. The driving positions were very
different between the two cars, with the seat positioned further forward
in the chassis for the NL-76. The NL-76 also featured some additional streamlining
at the front with the steering and suspension covered in a large fairing.
Two of each models were built and raced at the time, with
the Datsuns doing well at the Tamagawa Speedway, recording several race
wins against other much larger foreign cars. Also racing at Tamagawa at
this time was Soichiro Honda and his brother Benjiro, who were making Honda's
first tenative steps into the world of motorsport. This new era of motorsport
would prove to be short-lived, the next year war broke out between Japan
and China and Japan had begun it's descent into the Second World War, with
oil and petrol being rationed car racing was out of the question, and would
be for amny years to come. |
1936 Datsun
NL-75 Specifications
Length - unknown
Width - unknown
Height - unknown
Wheelbase - unknown
Weight - unknown
Top speed - unknown
Transmission - unknown |
Engine Specifications
Model - DAT
DOHC Supercharged 4 cylinder
Capacity - 747cc
Bore & Stroke - 56x76mm
Power - approx. 42hp
Torque - unknown
Compression - unknown
Fuel system - unknown
Final Drive - unknown |
1936
Datsun NL-76 Specifications
Length - unknown
Width - unknown
Height - unknown
Wheelbase - unknown
Weight - unknown
Top speed - unknown
Transmission - unknown |
Engine
Specifications
Model - Type 7
Side valve 4 cylinder
Capacity - 722cc
Bore & Stroke - 55x76mm
Power - 22hp@4000rpm
Torque - unknown
Compression - unknown
Fuel system - unknown
Final Drive - unknown |
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