When Nissan were first starting up operations in the USA in 1959 they sent out Yutaka Katayama to head up their new venture, and with him they sent an engineer by the name of Masahiko Zaitsu. Both Katayama and Zaitsu were motor sports and sports car enthusiasts, in particular Katayama, who founded the Sports Car Club of Japan in 1951, and more famously headed up the team that won it's in class in the 1958 around Australia race, the Mobil Gas Trial. Once they started to set things up in the USA they decided they needed to hire a local mechanic to become the company's Service Manager. They were quite fortunate because one of the people who applied for the position was a gentleman called Jean LaPlant, who had considerable experience with Austins, which was particularly handy when you consider the fact that Nissan were building Austins under licence at the time, and all the new Nissan models were based on Austin designs. Also helpful was the fact that LaPlant was an amateur race car driver, as was Benny Ackerman, another mechanic that was hired in the early days.
In 1959 the first car to wear the Fairlady name, the SPL212, went on sale in the USA. LaPlant, being the racer he was, suggested to Katayama and Zaitsu that they should race the SPL212 for publicity. It no doubt took little to persuade Katayama and Zaitsu, and soon funding arrived to set up "Team Nissan". The first Fairlady wasn't quite the performance car the later ones were, producing only 48hp, and was built on the chassis of a 223 series Datsun truck. The two American mechanics tinkered with the car to up the performance, and it was eventually entered in the "F Modified" class. The funding was minimal, with no provision for a pit crew, the drivers had to do everything themselves. Team Nissan debuted in 1960 with LaPlant driving, partnered by another local driver called Jim Nieland, and surprisingly managed to win a race in 1960 in Palm Springs.
The car was campaigned into 1961 and 1962 by LaPlant and Nieland, but in 1961 the decision was made to enter the car in another category, the All-American Women's series. The driver chosen to compete was a lady by the name of Norah Taylor. Norah's husband Sam was a racer, and Norah followed in his footsteps and started racing herself in 1955, driving her husband's MG TD. She soon got her own car and raced an MG TF before moving into a Lotus 4.
In 1961 she started driving the Fairlady. The competition in the "Ladies Series" was substantially more serious than the "F Modified" series the men were racing in. The men were racing in cars of a similar size and performance, whereas Norah went up against women driving Jaguar XK120, Ford Thunderbirds, Lotus 7, Alfa Romeo Guiletta and Sunbeam Alpines, to name a few. To her credit, although thoroughly out-classed in her truck based sports car, she still held her own and even managed one 4th place.
Norah stopped racing after that, but Jean LaPlant continued on, eventually driving the new SP310 race car when it debuted in 1963. The new SP310 was a much more serious machine, which went on to win numerous SCCA races between 1963 and 1965.
