Hoppy Team Tsuchiya, Max Racing Out Of Suzuka 450km

The release of the provisional SUPER GT Suzuka GT 450km Race entry list confirms two withdrawals from the GT300 race after vehicle fires in the previous round at Fuji Speedway.

Both GT300 class Toyota GR Supras prepared out of the Tsuchiya Engineering shop in Fujisawa will not take part in the fifth round on 27 August. Sadly, the absence of Hoppy Team Tsuchiya was known shortly after the team confirmed that the #25 Hoppy Schatz GR Supra of Togo Suganami and Seita Nonaka was a total loss.

The #25 team as a whole will not return for the remainder of the 2023 season – certainly not with their destroyed car, nor with any other vehicle.

The other Tsuchiya-prepared GR Supra is Max Racing’s #244 Hachi-Ichi GR Supra of Kimiya Sato and Atsushi Miyake, which suffered a similar but less damaging fire earlier in the same race. However, the damage was great enough to force them to miss this round as well.

Max Racing won its first and only GT300 race to date two seasons ago at Suzuka as Miyake and Yuui Tsutsumi gave the #244 GR Supra its first win.

With those two absences, the total field for the Suzuka summer round is down to just 40 cars – 15 in GT500, and 25 in GT300.

GT500 Championship leaders Katsumasa Chiyo and Mitsunori Takaboshi have a five-point lead over the duo of Sho Tsuboi and Ritomo Miyata. The #3 Niterra Motul Nissan Z of Chiyo and Takaboshi enters this race with a whopping 98 kilogrammes of Success Ballast, applied as 48kg of ballast weight, and a Stage 3 fuel flow restrictor which reduces its fuel flow rate from 95kg/h to 88 kg/h. The #36 au TOM’s GR Supra of Tsuboi and Miyata carries the same Stage 3 fuel flow restrictor and 38kg of ballast weight.

This represents a major opportunity for the pursuing teams and drivers to gain ground in the championship as the second half of the 2023 Autobacs SUPER GT Series begins.

Elsewhere in the GT300 class, 2018 GT300 Champion Haruki Kurosawa is entered as a driver for the first time in four years.

Less than a year after he and Naoya Gamou won the title together, Kurosawa retired from full-time SUPER GT racing in the middle of the 2019 season to become the new Team Director of K2 R&D LEON Racing. But he’s now entered as the third driver of the #65 LEON Pyramid Mercedes-AMG GT3, joining his regular driver combination of Gamou and Takuro Shinohara.

Whether his return will be a mere cameo appearance, or if the 45-year-old will actually see significant time behind the wheel is to be determined.

SUPER GT also welcomes back another experienced driver after some time away, albeit a much shorter absence: Bruno Spengler, the 2012 DTM champion, has returned for the remainder of the season to partner GT300 Championship leader Seiji Ara in the #7 Studie BMW M4 GT3. Spengler missed the previous three rounds due to calendar clashes in Europe – and he won’t have it easy on his return to action either: A win and a second-place finish in the last two races for the Studie M4 has already put it up to the maximum 100kg of Success Weight for the next two races.

Masataka Yanagida, BMW M Team Studie’s third driver who replaced Ara in the last three rounds, won’t join his two co-drivers at Suzuka.

NILZZ Racing has also opted for a three-driver line-up of Taiyo Ida, Takumi Sanada, and Masaya Kono in the #48 Shokumou/K’s Frontier Nissan GT-R GT3. Yuki Tanaka withdrew from Fuji at the last minute due to illness – and if he is fit to race, it may instead be in Aragon, Spain, for the upcoming Ligier European Series event (pending the announcement of their entry list).

Feature image © Hoppy Team Tsuchiya