NISSAN and Triple Eight. It’s a great ‘what if’ of Supercars – whether the perennial powerhouse team could have lifted the Altima out of the doldrums and into the limelight.

And it’s a conversation that actually happened, former Nissan Australia CEO Richard Emery has revealed.

Emery took over at the helm of Nissan locally in 2014 after its maiden season in Supercars with the Kelly Racing-run Altima.

It had been a brutal initiation, with Rick Kelly the best of the Victorian team’s four drivers in the 2013 championship standings in 14th, and there was quickly agitation from Japan to consider winding up the program.

Emery’s first task was to remould the core thinking behind Nissan’s involvement in Supercars.

“The first thing you have got to do when you’re running motorsport programs inside manufacturers, you’ve got to accept that if you go into it investing on the basis that you’re going to win, then don’t do it,” he told the V8 Sleuth Podcast.

“That’s not the going in position you should take.

“And one of the guys in Japan said, ‘well if you win, you can keep going’. I said, ‘that’s not how you run a motorsport program’.

“So I brought in a guy called Mitchell Wiley who had worked on the Ralliart program with Alan Heaphy; he is now running Repco’s marketing. So Mitch came in and I just said to him, ‘we’re going to make this program work whether we’re winning or losing’.

“So we have got to do other things, we have got to activate, we have got to generate interest, we have got to engage with the sport and the fans on the basis that it doesn’t matter whether we’re first or last.”

Emery revealed Roland Dane and Tim Edwards, the then supremos of Triple Eight and Tickford Racing respectively, were among those to approach him at different stages to gauge the potential to seize responsibility for the Nissans.

“I said, ‘listen Roland, don’t take this the wrong way, but let’s just say I did move my program to you and you won: who wins?’ Triple Eight will win,” he explained.

“They’ll say Triple Eight are the difference, not the Nissans.

“So I said from my perspective, if I can get the Nissan program competitive where it is, that has more value from a brand perspective…”

He added: “Did we seriously consider moving? No, I don’t think we ever got to the point.

“We certainly interrogated programs, the pros and the cons, of Kellys running it, and Rick and Todd, and how they were running the program.

“As you would expect a corporation to do, we did some due diligence; we actually had Larko (Mark Larkham) do some work for us in one of the years just to give us some feedback.

“But no, I think we were comfortable to stay where we were on the basis that as I said, we got the program to work whether we were winning or losing, and I think it would have diminished a bit if we were to abandon the Kellys and all of the hard work they put in.

“So we kind of felt some loyalty to be honest… I think Rick probably would have won a couple of championships in that period of time if he was driving for one of the other brands.

“So I think the sacrifice they put in and the cost of us changing or going across to other teams probably wouldn’t have been justified.”

The Altima ended up competing in Supercars for seven seasons, 2013-19.

It remains the last model, prior to the incoming Toyota Supra, to take on General Motors and Ford in the Supercars Championship.