Top Gear drives the Nissan Zeod

I'm on my second wedding ring. The first resides at the bottom of the Mediterranean somewhere, decoration in an octopus's garden. Given how that incident went down on the home front, its snugger-fitting replacement has never left my finger. Until today.

Because if I want to drive Nissan's Zeod Le Mans car, I have to remove it and any other jewellery. I quietly congratulate myself on not being a fan of inconveniently located piercings. I have also had to read a supplement on Hazardous Electric Vehicle awareness, practised how to exit the Zeod should the red light glow, proved I know the signage and barrier system and had a crash course in how electricity works. The team still shake their heads at the memory of the Le Mans marshals pushing the car without safety gloves on, of the Japanese driver casually stepping, not jumping, from the car.

Pictures: Jamie Lipman

This feature was originally published in the October 2014 issue of Top Gear magazine

Electricity, I'm constantly reminded, is tricky stuff. Especially when there's so much of it. Nissan won't discuss accurate figures, but there's a pair of electric motors delivering about 350bhp here, and, all told, they only need to shove along 770kg... 150kg of that is a battery pack the size of a dog kennel which slots up from underneath the car. Changing it takes about half an hour, which puts a hell of a dent in a pitstop time. But then the Zeod (Zero Emissions On Demand) isn't purely electric. It also has a turbocharged triple, lightly tuned from the version you'd find in the Juke. Lightly tuned to 400bhp or thereabouts. So we're talking about 750bhp in total.

Only we're not, because the authorities at Le Mans, presumably anxious that Nissan's dart would spear past various LMP cars, would only allow the Zeod to run on one or the other power source during the race. Today, if I'm good, I'm going to be allowed to use both together. Ah, yes, the race. It didn't exactly go Nissan's way. OK, the guys achieved two key goals by completing a lap entirely on electricity, and by topping 300kph on the Mulsanne straight. But the Zeod's race was over after just 23 minutes and five laps, halted by a fault in the transmission. Team manager Phil Barker is sanguine about the whole situation: "If I'm honest, Le Mans came about a month too early in the car's development." And with Nissan now turning its attention to LMP1, it's doubtful the Zeod will race again.

Hence why Nissan was happy to bring it down to Dunsfold and let TG have a go. The guys have an ulterior motive - they're desperate to find out how fast it'll go round our track. This, thankfully, is not my concern. Nissan has bought along Wolfgang Reip, a Belgian who came up through Nissan's GT Academy programme and was part of the Zeod driver line-up at Le Mans. It's also brought along pretty much the entire pit crew. A veritable swarm of them turned up yesterday afternoon and spent a couple of hours acting like rock-band roadies during a full-on stadium tour. When they'd finished, the apron outside the TG studio resembled a fully operational pit box and there wasn't a brown M&M in sight.

Today, the Zeod hovers over it all on its padded jack, looking like the back half of a pod racer. Given the contractual wranglings and legal disputes going on, Nissan won't thank me for bringing this up, but the elephant in the room is the DeltaWing. I drove it a few years ago, and the basic arrowhead principle and key man - Ben Bowlby - are the same ("He's Adrian Newey with bushier eyebrows" is Nissan Motorsport chief Darren Cox's succinct description).

Because the weight distribution, tyre dimensions and aerodynamics are all in proportion front to rear, the car is perfectly balanced despite the fact 80 per cent of the weight is dealt with by the rear wheels. "Just treat it like an old 911," Phil tells me.

Reip goes out first. We're running on just the three-cylinder to start, and it's fair to say it makes a tad more noise than in the Juke. He circulates for several laps, then, in the distance, we see smoke on the run-up from Hammerhead. A few seconds later, the sound waves reach us - the screech of rubber, thankfully, rather than anything more ominous. But what happened?

Reip appears to have forgotten the golden rule. When I drove the DeltaWing I kept being told, for obvious reasons, to aim a couple of feet wide of every apex. Reip, in setting up for the Follow Through, appeared to forget the width thing. The left rear dropped over the edge, and at 212kph (yep, live telemetry is a bitch for racing drivers, there's nowhere to hide), the Zeod surfed on its carbon undertray until it hit an innocuous runway reflector which jerked the back end into the air and pitched the Zeod into a series of enormous spins. The pirouetting skid marks are the most impressive I've ever seen at Dunsfold.

It's pushed back to the pits, fluid leaking from the battery pack, undertray scarred and cracked and carbon chassis bruised. But it's a tough thing, and a couple of hours later it's my turn to go out in it. At that precise moment, the ice cream van turns up, so my belts are tightened by a mechanic who's holding a Mr Whippy in his other hand, while my wedding ring is being juggled with a Twister by another. Phil, as team manager, is tucking into a Magnum. Naturally.

This all adds a surreal air to my attempt to get familiar in a cockpit that's more fighter aeroplane than racing car. I have an on-board radar system that projects the positions of other cars on a live video screen up to my left - essential at Le Mans when you have no other way of seeing behind you. There's also a DRS button and various rotary controllers on the fiendish steering wheel. I'm just high enough to be able to see the spindly nose jutting forwards and through it a man waving me out.

I fear my first launch might bring new definition to the term "kangarooing". It is a hopelessly amateurish getaway and, unfortunately, that's pretty much how the next five laps pan out. There are nine corners on a Dunsfold lap, 45 chances to get a corner right and I don't manage it once. I remember finding the DeltaWing easy to get into a groove with, but I seem to be overdriving the Zeod, going too deep into corners, getting understeer until I'm completely off the brakes. The balance isn't off - hard though it is to get your head round the physics, the actual behaviour of the car is perfectly predictable. I'm also forgetting to activate the DRS on the straights and pulling the paddle to change up when the car is set up to do it automatically. It's all a bit clever and five laps of familiarity is only enough to confirm that while the needle-nosed Zeod is properly rapid down the straights, it rides with all the finesse of a sack of bricks.

Given the Zeod looks like it ought to be able to hover over the track like Marty McFly's skateboard, I'm stunned at how rough Dunsfold feels, how the whole car is jarred by the surface changes and concrete patchwork. If I were a proper racing driver, I'd just keep it pinned, but I saw how that panned out for one this morning, so I'm backing off. Still, I'm going fast enough to be able to really feel the downforce working through the Follow Through, manifested in extreme steering weight. It's a car that demands very precise inputs, straight braking lines and...

"Ollie, go to Zeod 10, confirm Zeod 10," a voice crackles in my helmet. Turning the Zeod dial to 10 gives me combined hybrid power, about 1,000bhp per tonne. But it's how it arrives that takes your breath away. I forgot that electricity is there immediately, and as a result I ride a massive slide all the way through turn one. Massive. Turn-in to exit. If I'm honest, I'm quite proud of it, and press on determinedly towards Chicago. Where I spin.

Electricity is a very difficult thing to get to grips with in a racing car, because while you may want to progressively power out of Hammerhead, it wants to give you everything the moment you touch the throttle. I spear round for a few more laps, cross with myself that I'm struggling to get to grips with the Zeod, while massively admiring its abilities, design and pure speed, the fact it dares to be different, dares to show there's a different way. To me, the Zeod is a far more interesting and compelling project than an LMP1 car - Nissan's next project. Now, better go and find the man with my wedding ring before he melts it down for a battery terminal.