It may have been only twelve cars strong, but the first race of the GT300 Sprint Cup at Fuji Speedway, part of the Super GT x DTM Dream Race weekend, proved to be a rather eventful exhibition!
The race was won from pole position by the number 60 Syntium LM Corsa Lexus RC F GT3 of Hiroki Yoshimoto and Ritomo Miyata, but it was far from a lights-to-flag cruise in changing conditions, which almost produced a stunning upset with the #48 Shokumou Go&Fun Nissan GT-R GT3 of Masaki Tanaka and Taiyou Iida leading until the final lap of the race!
Yoshimoto led early on in the going, but Tanaka, the 53-year-old gentleman driver who’d never scored a top-ten result in 53 previous championship races, started to string together a string of fastest race laps and powered through to the lead on Lap 8!
Tanaka stretched his opening stint out to 15 laps, before pitting for a change of drivers to fellow gentleman driver Taiyou Iida and a change of all four tyres, with no refuelling. Iida was sent out, and by the time he’d completed his outlap, he now had a lead of 40 seconds to Miyata.
After the pit stops, the track began to rapidly improve, and thus set off a flurry of fastest laps being exchanged between Miyata, the #37 BH Auction Callaway Corvette C7 GT3-R of Ukyo Sasahara, and the #11 Planex SmaCam McLaren 720S GT3 of Kazuto Kotaka. By keeping pace with his fellow All-Japan F3 rivals, Miyata was able to take massive chunks of time out of Iida’s lead, as many as five seconds per lap when his Lexus was working in harmony with its Dunlop tyres!
Iida tried with all his might to keep the young Toyota prodigy at bay, but coming out of the final corner, Miyata slipstreamed past and took the lead into TGR Corner (Turn 1) on the final lap, giving Yoshimoto and Miyata the victory!
But it would be hard not to applaud the result from privateers NILZZ Racing Factory, who never finished better than 20th all season in the Super GT Series’ championship rounds, and were just one lap away from perhaps the upset of the year in their 2015-spec GT-R with an all-Bronze driver lineup!
The battle for the final podium place was hotly contested at the end, with the #52 Saitama Toyopet GreenBrave Toyota Mark X MC (Shigekazu Wakisaka/Hiroki Yoshida) that overtook the #30 Toyota GR Sport Prius PHV apr GT (Hiroaki Nagai/Manabu Orido) in the end for 3rd!
A somewhat expected result for the surging GreenBrave team and their Bridgestone-clad Mark X MC – but less so for the bright yellow Prius, the new front-engined models failing to score a top-ten finish all season long on their debuts.
5th was the #70 LM Corsa Ferrari 488 GT3 (Togo Suganami/Shunsuke Kohno) who got a great start in the opening laps via Suganami, who made his Super GT debut mid-way into the 2019 season.
And after a flurry of fastest laps, FIA Motorsport Games gold medalist Sasahara turned around what had been a dire race for gentleman co-driver Shinji Takei in the opening laps, to bring the Suzuka 10 Hours’ fan favourite Corvette home 6th.
The #25 Hoppy Toyota 86 MC (Takamitsu Matsui/Kimiya Sato) finished 7th in its penultimate race before retirement, the #31 Toyota Prius GT (Koki Saga/Yuhki Nakayama) was 8th, the #360 RunUp Rivaux GT-R (Takayuki Aoki/Atsushi Tanaka) was 9th, and the #9 MP Racing GT-R (Joe Shindo/Keiichi Inoue) was 10th.
Kotaka’s race came to an early halt when the #11 McLaren blew a left-rear tyre, he and Katsuaki Kubota were classified last, behind the #244 MAX Racing RC F (Go Hayato/Takeshi Tsuchiya) which slowed temporarily and dropped to 11th.
Tomorrow’s second race of the GT300 Sprint Cup begins from 11:35 AM JST / 3:35 AM CET – and what a race that could be if it’s even half as good as today’s!
