1936 Datsun NL-75 & NL-76

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.