Smashed Nissan set to return to racing

The Nissan Altima Super2 car that was heavily damaged during practice at Bathurst is set to be returned to the track in 2022.

MW Motorsport boss Matt White says that despite the heavy damage to the rear end of the car, that particular Altima will remain part of his team’s racing inventory.

“I think it’s fixable,” he said this week.

“It’s just damage to the rear end, the birdcage and all of that sort of stuff. It was all a bit unfortunate.

“It will go back to Todd Kelly’s workshop for repairs. It was built there so that’s where it needs to go to get repaired.”

Declan Fraser emerged uninjured after the crash in Practice 2 at Bathurst, though the damage to the car forced him out for the rest of the round.

The 21-year-old was pitched into a spin through the high-speed Sulman Park when the right-rear wheel-nut parted company.

Rear-on contact with the outside concrete wall lifted the rear wheels of the Nissan off the ground, before it spun down the road and came to rest before McPhillamy Park.

Fraser will continue in the Dunlop Series next year in Super2, announcing last week that he’ll join Cameron Hill in Triple Eight Race Engineering’s two-car line-up in the development category.

The Altima that Fraser raced this year is one of the original Altima chassis that dates back to Nissan’s debut in V8 Supercars in 2013.

It was Michael Caruso’s Norton Hornets car in that year and finished runner-up to James Moffat in the Nissan one-two at Winton.

Caruso continued driving the chassis into 2014 and took it to pole position at Albert Park running a special one-off beyondblue livery.

It ran a retro Bluebird livery for that year’s Bathurst 1000 and was rebranded with NISMO colours for 2015, though crashed by Caruso at Turn 8 in Adelaide and sidelined for the rest of that season.

The chassis returned in 2016 and was raced by Dale Wood before being sold to MW Motorsport at the end of that season.

It has competed ever since in the Dunlop Super2 Series with the team, campaigned in 2017 by Shae Davies in not only the Super2 Series but also Supercars Championship wildcard appearances at Winton and Queensland Raceway.

Alex Rullo drove it in the 2018 Super2 Series (in which he scored his first Super2 race win at Barbagallo) before it became Zane Goddard’s car in 2019, Zak Best’s in 2020 and Fraser’s this year.