Since its inception back in 1984, Nissan’s performance shop, NISMO, has built a few hard-edged street cars to validate their race car building addiction. The touch-and-go nature of their street car releases looks to change however as Nissan Motorsports International Co., Ltd announced a major expansion will take place very soon. The programme laid out is designed to bring the NISMO name out to the public at a level previously unheard of. “NISMO adds even more excitement and innovation to Nissan products. We now plan to inject that style and excitement into other models in the Nissan range,” says Shoichi Miyatani, President of NISMO.
The brand’s first project under their new direction will be applied to the Nissan Juke compact crossover. NISMO will touch just about everything on the little SUV by lowering and tuning the suspension, sculpting the body and adding power to the tuner-friendly 1.6 liter turbocharged, direct injected inline four cylinder. Nissan themselves admitted that in the past, NISMO’s expertise was either spent exclusively on their racing cars and or the cult classic Z cars. New aftermarket parts of more “mainstream” vehicles will be built and sold openly to the public. In order to make sure the outfit has the space to follow through, a relocation to an all-new, purpose built headquarters in Tsurumi, Yokohama will happen beginning 2013.
