I have been all over the world since the opening round of the Super GT Championship at Okayama. We’ve launched GT Academy Mexico, tested the new Nissan ZEOD RD in France and then, after a VLN race at the Nurburgring, I jumped on a plane to Tokyo for the next round of Super GT.
Before I could get back in my Super GT car I had to go to B-MAX to collect my overalls. This is how it is when you are racing everywhere; I have left my stuff on every continent!
Thursday was my birthday so I had a day off; time to relax and do some training and then shopping in Tokyo. Kazuki-san organised a dinner with some racing drivers including Motoyama-san (my team mate at Le Mans), Yanagida-san, JP Oliveira and Chiyo-san. It was a great night and I will never forget my birthday in Japan.
The following day it was back to business. We had a good free practice session, showing great pace in our GT3 GT-R. In the first qualifying session Kazuki-san took the wheel, placing the car P4 which was fantastic. I went out for Q2 and on my first lap I braked too late into the chicane but my second lap felt great. I had total confidence in the car and I pushed to the limit and bagged pole position!
This was one of the greatest moments of my racing career. Only my second Super GT race of the season and I took pole position. It was so good to see all of the NISMO guys congratulating us and of course it was a huge celebration as the Nissan GT500 cars qualified 1-2-3!
The atmosphere on race day morning was amazing as it was a full house at Fuji. The only time I have raced in front of a crowd like that was at Le Mans. I had to do a speech to Nissan sponsors and team members and despite practising it over and over I was still very nervous – probably more nervous than at the start of a race – but they seemed to like what I was saying.
I had a lot of fun just before the race as I went to the Gran Turismo stage in the fan area to race against GT500 drivers from Toyota and Honda. I had a tough race against Kazuya Oshima (Toyota) and Koudai Tsukakoshi (Honda). They were really impressive on Gran Turismo. It was a tough race! I took the lead into the straight but Tsukakoshi got the slipstream and nearly beat me. I couldn’t have that with my history and luckily I was able to fight back and take the win!
Kazuki-san started the race in our car and did a great job, keeping the lead from pole. Unfortunately a later safety car period ruined our strategy so we had to save fuel from then on as we were really on the limit. I had a great stint, recovering from losing time refuelling and managed to put the car on top again and even built up an eight second gap. All this was in vain though as we use more fuel than our rivals so we lost time in the last pit-stop. We finished the race in fifth place.
I’m fully focused on round three at Autopolis now. Our plan is the same as always: to fight for victory!
