KCMG’s longest-tenured driver reflects on a season of growing in the Intercontinental GT Challenge, ahead of the season finale in Kyalami.
Swiss-born driver Alexandre Imperatori has ventured quite a long way from his birthplace of Châtel-Saint-Denis in Switzerland, in a racing career that’s spanned over 15 years. And much of that career has been spent racing with KC Motorgroup (KCMG), the Hong Kong-based team who represent Nissan in the SRO Intercontinental GT Challenge.
How deep do Imperatori’s ties with KCMG run?
“Yeah! I’ve been with the team since before it was called KCMG, actually!” Imperatori laughs. “The first time I raced for [KCMG founder] Paul Ip was back in 2008 in All-Japan F3’s National Class. I was there for the first season of this team.”
Back in 2008, KCMG operated under a different four-letter acronym, PTRS, when Imperatori first burst onto the Japanese scene.
“The opportunity came about when I was racing in the Asian Formula Renault Championship, and that’s how I met Paul and [Ryuji] Doi, who is now KCMG’s motorsport director. I knew Doi-san a little bit from the Formula Renault days when he was bringing some of the Japanese drivers to Formula Renault. That’s when they contacted me and the opportunity came about. He was entering two cars in All-Japan F3. And I’ve been with KCMG on and off, mostly on, ever since.”
Finishing runner-up in the 2007 Asian Formula Renault Championship, just two places ahead of future IndyCar Series Rookie of the Year Felix Rosenqvist, Imperatori made the jump to All-Japan F3 with the team now known as KCMG. He finished runner up to future Subaru factory racer Hideki Yamauchi in his rookie year, then third in 2009, the year that future Super GT/Super Formula Double Champion, Naoki Yamamoto, won the title.
By 2011, Imperatori was now firmly entrenched in KCMG. That year, he stepped up from All-Japan Formula 3 into the Formula Nippon Championship (now known as Super Formula). He also stepped up to the GT300 class with Team SG Changi, a team that was operated by KCMG’s staff. In an impressive rookie campaign alongside Ryo Orime, Imperatori scored his first career win at Sportsland Sugo, racked up two more podiums at Fuji Speedway and Autopolis, and finished 6th in the GT300 Drivers’ Championship.
“It’s really hard to pinpoint one thing. I did some GT300, Formula Nippon… I think the Le Mans project was really a highlight,” Imperatori reflects, his career transitioning from Japan to the world scene with KCMG in the FIA World Endurance Championship.
It was a project that began with Imperatori, Matt Howson, and Ho-Pin Tung in the 2013 24 Hours of Le Mans, and Imperatori was around to close out the 2014 season with back-to-back wins in the LMP2 category.
By the time Imperatori stepped up to LMP1 with Rebellion Racing in 2015, KCMG was one of the top LMP2 teams in the WEC, and KCMG solidified that when they became the first team from Hong Kong to win a class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, with the new Oreca 05 of Howson, Nicolas Lapierre, and Richard Bradley claiming the victory.
“I was a little bit sad to miss out on the win [in 2015], for sure,” says Imperatori, “but it was great to see the team performing well and getting their success, so on that side, it was nice. And developing the Le Mans project, for sure, was a highlight [of my career].”
“It fills me with pride and with pleasure to see KCMG grow from where they were back then, to becoming the powerhouse that it is now – with the class win at Le Mans, and all the things that Paul has done since then.”
Imperatori never forgot his roots. Four years after driving KCMG to back-to-back LMP2 class wins in the 6 Hours of Bahrain and São Paulo, the Swiss driver came back to the team where he first got his start to spearhead a new project for 2018, a two-car Nissan Customer Racing effort in the Blancpain GT Asia Series.
“What we’re doing now, on the GT side of things, is something that I’m deeply involved with. Seeing it grow from the beginning of last year when we got the new Nissan GT-Rs – and we had to develop the package, we had to rebuild the team from the ground up, it’s been a very nice experience once again.”
And in 2019, KCMG and Nissan made the commitment to a full season of the Intercontinental GT Challenge. Imperatori, alongside co-drivers Edoardo Liberati and Oliver Jarvis, took time to reflect on a season that’s been filled with promise but mired with strokes of bad fortune.
“I think we’ve had promising races, promising performances. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to turn it into a strong result, for various reasons. We were very strong in Bathurst, in discovering the event there, it wasn’t easy. We were performing well, but unfortunately, we had a few issues with the car, and it meant we didn’t get the result that the car deserved.”
“Again, at Laguna Seca, we had strong flashes of speed, especially in qualifying trim – but couldn’t quite sustain that during the race. We had too much tyre degradation to really sustain [that speed] over a stint in race pace.”
A sixth-place finish for the number 018 GT-R of Imperatori, Jarvis, and Liberati remains the joint-best result by a KCMG Nissan this season, matched by a sixth-place finish for the sister car of Tsugio Matsuda, Katsumasa Chiyo, and Joshua Burdon, in the Suzuka 10 Hours, a race where the #018’s race was compromised not only by a suspension issue that cost them six laps during the race but also by the scenes of the drivers’ side door getting stuck in the final hours.
Nonetheless, Imperatori remains optimistic about the progress that this team has made from the start of the IGTC season (and their Dubai 24 Hours entry in January prior to that), to the approach of the final round, the Kyalami 9 Hours, this coming weekend.
“We can see the car is developing, and we’ve grown a lot stronger as a team. At the beginning of the season, we didn’t have everything quite together, but we’ve come along nicely. KCMG has been putting a lot of effort into raising our level, stepping up, and I think it’s showing. Now, all we need is to turn this into a strong result, and that’s what we’re hoping to achieve this weekend.”
About the Kyalami Circuit – renovated in 2016 to restore the South African venue to international prominence, Imperatori harkens back to his days as A1GP Team Switzerland’s reserve driver, the understudy to future World Endurance Drivers’ Champion and Le Mans winner Neel Jani. “I’ve been there back in the A1GP days, when I was a rookie driving for Team Switzerland. I raced on the old layout, yes, but I have really fond memories of the track, and of the fans there. So I’m really looking forward to going back there, and hopefully, the track suits us and we can get a good result to finish the season!”
As for Imperatori, he now considers Asia to be his home turf, living in China, and racing all throughout the Asia-Pacific region for most of his career. “This is now just the new normal for me, to be out here! I’ve lived in China now since 2007, over twelve years now, and I have a family there. I’ve raced a lot in Japan as well, where the fans are amazing, and the racing is amazing.”
“Quite often in Europe we don’t often realize what’s going on out here in Japan, and it’s actually great racing at a high level: Super GT300, GT500, Super Formula, they’ve got really great drivers. Living out here – it really is home for me. What makes me proud is that we’re competing as an Asian team on the international scene, and performing well, really showing that we’ve got talent, not just talented drivers, but as a team that can really compete on the international scene!”
That KCMG team – with Imperatori helping to lead the charge with Oliver Jarvis and Eduardo Liberati in one corner, and Josh Burdon, Katsumasa Chiyo, and Joao Paulo de Oliveira in the other, has one more chance to close the season on a high and make good on the promise and the pace that they’ve demonstrated from Bathurst to Kyalami and all the stops in between.
