What a week for Nissan enthusiasts, and it’s only Thursday. In February Nissan’s new CEO Ivan Espinosa told The Drive to tell enthusiasts, “Nissan is back.” Words are cheap and proof is in the product. But just one year into the driver’s seat and Espinosa, and his team of executives who are now mostly enthusiasts, seem to be moving as quickly as humanly possible to deliver on that big statement. On Thursday in Japan, Richard Candler, the man in charge of Nissan’s global corporate product strategy, told The Drive “We are really deeply looking at the sports [car] lineup again. We all want to do some cool cars.” Candler noted his first car he ever bought was a Silvia and that he did so while living in the UK where he is from. “So, I’d love to bring back that nameplate. I do think it’s really valuable. You saw yesterday, you know, the announcement around Skyline. This has been a big passion product for us. And the reaction we’re seeing so far is really good, so we’re really pleased about that. Z’s good as well. It’s a really good solid product. With Z and Skyline, we start to bring back a good lineup. I think there’s still space for Sylvia, and we’d like to,” Candler said. Candler went on to say, “We need to find the right solution for it because I think price accessibility is important for that product. We need to find the right positioning. Then, in terms of the rest of the sports car lineup, we’ve got some pretty great names that we would like to develop further.” These sentiments about sports cars match those of Espinosa, who told The Drive on Tuesday, “The sports cars are the core of what we are as a company.” But neither executive is living outside of reality. Nissan’s on the ropes and in the midst of a huge turnaround plan that will see the automaker shrink its product lineup from 56 to 45 models. The refocusing will shift 80% of the product into three key families of vehicles. One of those families is the new frame-based lineup, which is being kicked off and anchored by the return of the Xterra. Chairman Nissan Americas Christian Meunier teased the Xterra and said “badass is back.” Candler said, “But, you know, step by step. I think what I’m trying to do with the portfolio is carve out some space, you know, by stopping some of the low-running cars. We’re going to shrink our portfolio a bit. We’re going to stop cars that you probably won’t even notice and then reinvest that money into a few passion projects.” “It’s important that we do a bit of a look back and say, look, what works, what doesn’t work?” Candler said. Candler explained the business logic by saying, “All of those cars [we are going to kill] consume money, for the company to keep them on, to keep them going, keep them homologated, latest requirements, standards, etc. That takes up a certain amount of resources. We could sort of stop those without a lot of business impact and then bring in, you know, let’s invest in the Silvia or let’s invest in something even smaller. I mean, I’ve also got an ambition personally to find something maybe even smaller than that.” You know what was smaller than the Silvia and is a crime it never got built? The IDX and IDX Nismo concepts. The IDX and then the Silvia slotting beneath the Z and then GT-R would be just a lovely little sports car lineup.