Next is the GT300 Championship, now less of a wide-open affair after the championship leaders won the most recent round in Sportsland Sugo.
After giving up a 12-point lead in the championship in last year’s Motegi 250km Grand Final, ARTA are determined not to let it happen again as drivers Shinichi Takagi and Nirei Fukuzumi have a 14 and a half point lead in the standings following their comprehensive victory at Sugo.
ARTA haven’t won a share of a GT300 championship since 2002, which was also the year of Takagi’s only GT300 championship title. The second-winningest driver in Super GT’s second division wants to become a two-time champion after finishing runner-up four times in the years since. For Honda protege Fukuzumi, he stands to become the sixth different rookie to win the GT300 Championship in their first full season in the series. And of course, this would be the Honda NSX GT3’s first GT300 title in Japan, and there’s no better place to wrap it up than at the home ground of Honda motorsport!
Points-scorers in all seven races this season, all that Takagi and Fukuzumi have to do is finish fourth or better to clinch the title. If they take pole position, they can win the title with a fifth-place finish. They can also clinch it if the #96 finishes third or lower, and/or the #4 and #56 fail to take pole position and win the race as well.
But Takagi hasn’t won at Motegi since 2004, and the 2016 double-header finale wasn’t kind to the ARTA ace when he crashed out of race one and the team withdrew from race two. As for Fukuzumi, he swept the weekend in the 2015 All-Japan Formula 3 Championship round at Motegi, and finished 5th in this year’s Super Formula round at Motegi.
Winners of two of the first three races this season, K-Tunes Racing’s charge from 5th to 3rd in the closing laps at Sugo proved important to keep them as close to ARTA as possible going into the final race of the season. They know that K2 R&D LEON Racing came back from a deep deficit at Motegi to win the title last year, and Morio Nitta and Sena Sakaguchi are determined to do the same this year.
Already the winningest GT300 driver in history, Nitta would make history of his own by securing his record fourth championship title, breaking the deadlock with Taniguchi, Kataoka, and Tetsuya Yamano. It would also make him the series’ oldest champion, age 52. For 20-year-old Sakaguchi, who wasn’t even born when Nitta took his first title in 1996, he’d stand to become the youngest GT300 champion, breaking Kazuya Oshima’s mark set in 2007 by three months, and in his first season in GT300 no less.
A third win of the 2019 season would require the #55 to finish 6th or lower for Nitta and Sakaguchi to become champions. They can also win the title by finishing 2nd, but they’d then need the #55 to finish 11th or lower. But their chances are much better than they were looking with 15 laps to go in the Sugo round.
Only one of Nitta’s record 22 victories has come at Motegi, in 2004. He has five other podium finishes, but just one in the last eleven trips to the circuit, 2nd in 2014. Sakaguchi’s return to Motegi will be met with some anxiety for the former Honda junior, who won the 2016 FIA F4 Japanese Championship season finale at Motegi, his only competitive victory at the circuit.
The Goodsmile Hatsune Miku Mercedes is one of two GT300 cars whose hopes of winning the championship rest upon qualifying on pole position, going on to win the race, with the #55 finishing outside the top ten and the #96 finishing 3rd or lower.
Coming off of their first podium finish of the season, Goodsmile Racing & Team UKYO have their fourth GT300 Championship in nine seasons at stake. Already considered among the greatest teams in GT300 history with titles in 2011, 2014, and 2017, a fourth title for the team led by principal Ukyo Katayama would put them over the top.
It would also put both drivers over the top, as both Nobuteru Taniguchi and Tatsuya Kataoka would win their fourth GT300 Drivers’ Championships each, and surpass Nitta and Yamano in doing so. Since uniting in 2012, Taniguchi and Kataoka have scored seven straight top-four finishes at Motegi, and five straight podiums since 2014, but no victories as a driver tandem.
Individually, Taniguchi has won at Motegi twice, in 2007 and in 2011 when he won his first title for GSR. Kataoka won his debut race in the series in 2003 at Motegi, but hasn’t been on the top step since.
The other team needing a pole-to-win victory with the #55 finishing outside the top ten and the #96 finishing outside the top two is the Kondo Racing GT-R GT3, in this team’s first season after moving from Super Taikyu, where they were dominant champions in 2016, to GT300.
Kondo Racing have never won a GT500 Championship since entering the series in 2006, but a GT300 title would still be very special to the team, especially in their first year on the GT300 circuit with the student and service mechanics backing the team courtesy of the Nissan Mechanic Challenge.
Hiramine, now in his fifth full season as a GT300 driver, was part of Kondo Racing’s 2016 Super Taikyu title run all season long and wants to become a first-time champion in the series. Fenestraz has already made history as the last champion of the All-Japan Formula 3 Championship under that current title, and the Franco-Argentine rookie hasn’t given up his dreams of doing the F3/GT300 “Junior Double Championship,” last accomplished by Oshima in 2007.
Fenestraz locked up the F3 title with two wins in the three races that weekend, his first-ever visit to the track. Hiramine knows the track a bit better from his time as a Honda junior driver. He took swept the weekend in the F3 National Class in 2012, with two victories of his own. He also won pole for last year’s Motegi 250km, before a puncture ended his bid for the victory, his third straight non-finishing result in four previous starts.
