Cheng Congfu and James Yu Kuai drove the #16 FAW Audi Sport Asia Team Phantom R8 LMS GT3 EVO II to its second GT World Challenge Asia win of the season during an eventful Race 1 from Okayama International Circuit.
The Silver class duo grabbed the lead and the win midway through the race, and held on to take the chequered flag just under two seconds ahead of the #500 Team 5Zigen Nissan GT-R NISMO GT3 driven by Takayuki Aoki and Atsushi Miyake.
But early on in Saturday’s one-hour sprint, Sandy Stuvik and the #29 Absolute Racing Lamborghini Huracán GT3 EVO2 held all the cards. From pole position, Stuvik immediately took a 2.2 second lead over the field over Cheng after the first green flag lap. The Thai driver, making his first GT World Asia start since 2022, then stretched his lead out to as much as over seven seconds when the race reached one-third distance.
It was shortly before that when light rain led the race to be declared ‘wet’ by race control, but that light sprinkling of rain soon turned into heavier rain. At the 19th minute, both Song Jiajun in the #72 Apex Predator Harmony Racing Ferrari and Haziq Oh in the #20 HZO Fortis Racing by Absolute Porsche spun off at the first corner and beached their cars in the gravel. A Full Course Yellow was called, and would continue until the end of the compulsory window for pit stops.
Hoping to time his stop perfectly, Stuvik slowed down on the approach to pit lane, and also made the call to take wet tyres for Akash Nandy’s stint. That hesitation from Stuvik allowed the #16 Audi of Yu to jump ahead into the race lead once all pit stops were done. Worse, the rain quickly lifted and the #29 Lamborghini would have to come to the pits again to switch to slicks.
The field was brought behind a Safety Car and then with less than 19 minutes left, racing action resumed. Yu did his best to hold off the #500 Nissan of Miyake over the closing laps with another brilliant performance from the young Chinese driver, one which has put himself and Cheng back in contention for the overall series championship.
Behind the 5Zigen Nissan of Aoki and Miyake, the two Team KRC BMWs finished third and fourth, led by the #89 of Ruan Cunfan and Neil Verhagen. Verhagen put together a stirring drive from fifth to third in the final minutes, finishing only two seconds behind the #500 GT-R.
In fourth place was the #10 GTO by KRC M4 of Brian Lee and Maxime Oosten, which took advantage of a late drive-through penalty for the #81 Climax Racing Mercedes-AMG GT3 EVO (Li Lichao/Elias Seppänen) for speeding in the pits. KRC took Pro-Am and Silver-Am class victory, respectively.
And after a storming drive from Laurin Heinrich the #11 Origine Motorsport Porsche 911 GT3 R of Heinrich and Lu Wei charged from tenth to fifth place.
The #96 Harmony Racing Ferrari (Chen Weian/Liu Kaishun) finished sixth, just ahead of the #5 BMW M Team Studie M4 (Tomohide Yamaguchi/Seiji Ara), the #911 Absolute Racing Porsche (Huang Ruohan/Alessandro Ghiretti), the #15 Audi Sport Asia Team Phantom R8 (Andrés Pato/Jaxon Evans), and then the #29 Absolute Racing Lamborghini recovered to finish tenth.
The #37 Phantom Global Racing Porsche (Anthony Liu/Ayhancan Güven) recovered from an early right-rear puncture to finish 12th overall, just a few seconds away from breaching the top ten.
Despite going off at the Hairpin Corner when the rainfall was at its hardest, the #8 Climax Racing Mercedes-AMG of Setiawan Santoso and Zhou Bihuang took the Am class victory in 15th overall.
20 cars finished out of 23 starters, with the #61 EBM Porsche (Adrian D’Silva/Enzo Trulli) last over the line – though a race finish after the weekend the team has endured is not a bad return at all.
Along with the #20 Porsche and #72 Ferrari, the #60 LM corsa Ferrari (Shigekazu Wakisaka/Ryo Ogawa) retired with less than ten minutes to go – a tough blow for Ogawa who was running in the top ten.
Origine’s Lu Wei now leads the overall standings by two points over Huang/Ghiretti who’ve fallen to second; Cheng and Yu are now third in points, seven points out of first place.
Race 2 starts tomorrow morning at 10:00 AM JST (local time).
Images © SRO Motorsports Group
