PREVIOUS DRIVES ::: Nissan P35 Group C & Daytona The first is probably my favorite. It was the Nissan P-35 Group C car. It was built by NPTI back in 1992 and the engines supplied by Nismo. It used a 12 cylinder engine that just screamed…the sound was amazing….but unfortunately did not have much power. The car never raced, as Nissan ran into money problems, but we did do several tests with the car at Daytona. The Plan was for it to be raced only at Daytona and Le Mans of 2003. The drivers were going to be myself, Geoff Brabham, Arie Lyendyk, Bob Earl, James Weaver, and then one other person they had not decided on. Anyway, the handling of the car was just amazing. We tested on the same circuit that they are still using at Daytona, and our best lap times were in the 1:38 second range. Now what really made this amazing was that our best top speed ever was only about 172 MPH…like I said, not much power !! But to do times like that, we were totally hauling ass through the corners and under braking. It was psychotic how deep you could go into corners….and then how early you could get on the throttle. Anyway, I was totally looking forward to getting to race the car, but instead it ended up being scrapped. If you remember back to the NPTI days, it was at that time that they were considering making the move to CART. The plan was for myself and Geoff Brabham to do development work in 93 with the idea of racing in CART in 1994. Needless to say I was thinking that I would finally get my shot at CART…but then Nissan of Japan pulled the plug. It was quite a shame. Luckily for me, I had impressed the powers to be enough that they moved me over to the GTS car for the 1993 IMSA season. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ You know, it completely pisses me off that we aren’t racing at Daytona anymore. When I first went there in 1988, I got to see some of the best cars and drivers from all over the world. Different manufacturers doing battle, lots of fans…a totally amazing event that you really wanted to win bad. I remember being out there in the GTS car in 93, and having other strong GTS cars to battle like the Roush fords, and the Oldsmobiles of GM. At the same time you were seeing Jaguars and Nissans and Porsches and Toyotas just having amazing fights. The competition was amazing…like we have now in the ALMS. It was a great way to start off the racing season. Oh well, maybe in a few years we will get back. But hey, even if we don’t ….I always liked racing at Sebring a lot more !!!!!   Site contents © 2002 Johnny O'Connell GM, GM Emblem, Corvette and the Corvette Emblem are registered trademarks of General Motors Corporation and used with permission.