Breaking an 18-year-old course record, the #19 WedsSport Advan Toyota GR Supra GT500 will start on pole position for tomorrow’s SUPER GT Malaysia Festival at Petronas Sepang International Circuit.
Yuji Kunimoto and Sena Sakaguchi led their respective qualifying sessions in the blue and yellow Toyota – Kunimoto set the fastest time in Q1, sending Sakaguchi through to fight for pole in Q2. He secured his fifth career GT500 pole position with a record time of 1:49.748, which broke the previous GT500 course record (1:54.306), set in 2007 by Takashi Kogure.
It puts a Toyota on pole for Saturday’s race, as the manufacturer looks for a potential record seventh consecutive GT500 class win, breaking a tie with Honda set across 1998-1999.
Sakaguchi said: “Before the start of Qualifying, I was just so tense. In the previous round at Fuji, Kunimoto-san got the top time in Q1, but I wasn’t able to get the top time in Q2, and because of that I felt a heavy burden. I wasn’t thinking about getting a time in the 1:49 range, so in my time attacks, I just wanted to bring out the best performance I could from myself, the car and the tyres.
“In the qualifying, I felt that I was able to perform with a good feeling thanks to the support of the team and the people at Yokohama Tyre. In tomorrow’s race, I want to do my best to be able to pay them back for everything.”
Sakaguchi was six-tenths clear of the #8 ARTA Mugen Honda Civic Type R-GT (Tomoki Nojiri/Nobuharu Matsushita) which qualified in second with a 1:50.350 from Nojiri, with the Dunlop-clad #64 Modulo Civic (Takuya Izawa/Riki Okusa) in an impressive third place.
Of the Bridgestone-shod Toyotas, the #37 Deloitte TOM’S GR Supra (Ukyo Sasahara/Giuliano Alesi) was the fastest in fourth. The fastest Nissan was the #3 Niterra Motul Z NISMO GT500 (Daiki Sasaki/Atsushi Miyake) in fifth, followed by the #12 TRS Impul Z (Kazuki Hiramine/Bertrand Baguette) in sixth.
The #17 Astemo Civic (Koudai Tsukakoshi/Syun Koide) was seventh, then in eighth, despite carrying a ‘Level 2’ fuel flow restrictor and 36 extra kilos of physical Success Weight, was the #1 au TOM’S GR Supra of championship leaders Sho Tsuboi and Kenta Yamashita.
Fuji 3 Hour winners Hiroaki Ishiura and Toshiki Oyu were ninth in the #38 KeePer Cerumo GR Supra, while the #39 Denso Kobelco SARD GR Supra (Yuhi Sekiguchi/Sacha Fenestraz), which set the fastest time in Free Practice 2 this morning, will start tenth – after Fenestraz suffered an engine failure on his out lap in Q2.
The #100 Stanley Civic (Naoki Yamamoto/Tadasuke Makino) missed the cut for Q2 by just seven-hundredths of a second and will start 11th in tomorrow’s 55-lap race.
In GT300, the #18 UPGarage Mercedes-AMG GT3 of Takashi Kobayashi and Yuto Nomura will start at the head of a 19-car field. Nomura, a GT300 rookie and top prospect of the Honda Formula Dream Project (HFDP) academy, won the pole in Q2 with a lap of 2:02.110, in just his third-ever start.
Nomura’s lap was also a new course record, breaking the previous mark (2:03.025) set by Shinichi Takagi in the most recent Sepang race in 2013.
“I am very happy about being able to get my first pole position,” Nomura said. “I felt that the conditions were good for us from practice, and because of that, I felt very nervous going into qualifying. Still, from practice, I got a good feeling about the condition of the track, so when I went into my time attacks the result was that we got pole position. I am very happy with this result.”
The #52 Saitama Green Brave Toyota GR Supra (Hiroki Yoshida/Seita Nonaka) put together a strong second-place qualifying run with a 2:02.475 from Yoshida.
Defending series champions JLOC put their two cars on the second row, with the #0 Venteny Lamborghini Huracán GT3 EVO2 (Takashi Kogure/Yuya Motojima) in third, and the #87 Metalive S Huracán (Kosuke Matsuura/Natsu Sakaguchi) in fourth.
Behind them, the #61 Subaru BRZ R&D Sport (Takuto Iguchi/Hideki Yamauchi) rounded out the top five in the class.
The quickest of the two EBM Giga Racing cars, entered as local wildcards, was the #611 EBM Giga Porsche 911 GT3 R of Adrian D’Silva and Dorian Boccolacci. Boccolacci actually went quickest in Q1 Group A with a 2:02.623 – good enough to secure 11th on the grid even after Malaysian Am driver D’Silva failed to set a time in Q2.
That still puts the Porsche ahead of the Fuji-winning #6 Uni-Robo Bluegrass Ferrari 296 GT3 (Yoshiaki Katayama/Roberto Merhi) which missed the cut for Q2 and qualified 12th, and the championship-leading #65 LEON Pyramid AMG (Naoya Gamou/Togo Suganami) in 14th.
EBM Giga Racing’s #333 Aston Martin Vantage GT3 of Li Kerong and Jazeman Jaafar will start 17th – while the #45 PONOS Racing Ferrari 296 GT3 (Kei Cozzolino/Takuro Shinohara) was excluded after failing post-qualifying technical inspection.
Images © GTA
