TGR Team KeePer Cerumo recovered from a heavy crash in the first race at Okayama International Circuit in fine fashion: Toshiki Oyu won the pole for Sunday’s SUPER GT Fuji GT 3 Hour Race: GW Special. Oyu and co-driver Hiroaki Ishiura are now in prime position to end the team’s winless drought.
Saturday’s weather at Fuji Speedway was absolutely picture-perfect – beautiful conditions for practice and qualifying – and the Toyota GR Supra GT500s looked like the cars to beat as they did for most of 2025. Sena Sakaguchi in the #19 WedsSport Advan GR Supra recorded the fastest time in GT500 during free practice.
Sakaguchi’s co-driver Yuji Kunimoto backed up that pace in GT500 Q1, turning in the fastest time with a 1:26.490. All but one car was within nine-tenths of a second of Kunimoto’s top time, including Ishiura, who was third-fastest. But only ten cars could advance to the pole shootout in Q2.
That first hurdle was where the Okayama pole-winning #14 Eneos X Prime GR Supra (11th) and the #100 Stanley Honda Civic Type R-GT (13th) fell, along with three-quarters of the Nissan GT500 fleet, with the #23 Motul Autech Nissan Z NISMO GT500 all the way down in last.
With the #38 KeePer Cerumo GR Supra through to Q2, Oyu needed just one flying lap – a 1:26.093 – to take provisional pole. Sakaguchi strung together fast second and third sectors, but his 1:36.212 was only enough to put the #19 WedsSport GR Supra on the outside of an all-Toyota front row – at the Toyota-owned circuit!
“Since we had to retire early on in the previous round, all the members of our team came here with the aim of making up for that in this second round at Fuji,” Oyu said after recording his second career GT500 Pole Position, and first as a Toyota factory driver. “And thanks to the efforts, especially of our team mechanics, to repair the car to perfection, I drove with the hope of repaying them by getting a good position in qualifying. But I didn’t expect to be able to get pole position, so I am really glad for this result.”
Could it have been Oyu’s recent outing in last week’s Formula Drift Japan event at Fuji that made the difference? “Maybe it was thanks to the fact that I came to Fuji Speedway last week to drive!” he laughed.
Kunimoto, Sakaguchi, and third driver Kazuto Kotaka will start second in the Yokohama-clad WedsSport GR Supra, back to its previous best from Qualifying in years gone by.
In front of the second Toyota front-row lockout of the season, the two ARTA Hondas qualified third and fourth. The blue #16 ARTA Mugen Civic (Hiroki Otsu/Ren Sato) will line up on the inside of row two, next to the orange #8 ARTA Civic (Tomoki Nojiri/Nobuharu Matsushita).
The only Nissan to advance to Q2, the #3 Niterra Motul Z (Daiki Sasaki/Atsushi Miyake), was fifth ahead of the two TOM’S Toyotas. In sixth was the #37 Deloitte TOM’S GR Supra (Ukyo Sasahara/Giulano Alesi), then, going for their fourth win in a row across two SUPER GT seasons, the #1 au TOM’S GR Supra of Sho Tsuboi and Kenta Yamashita in seventh.
Rounding out the top ten from GT500 qualifying were the #39 Denso Kobelco SARD GR Supra (Yuhi Sekiguchi/Sacha Fenestraz), the #17 Astemo Civic Type R-GT (Koudai Tsukakoshi/Syun Koide), and the #64 Modulo Civic Type R-GT (Takuya Izawa/Riki Okusa).
In GT300, pole position went to the #777 D’station Aston Martin Vantage GT3 of Tomonobu Fujii and Charlie Fagg. One year on from the Englishman’s GT300 debut, he secured his second career pole position with a near-record time of 1:34.820.
“I feel really good,” Fagg said after swiping the top time in Q2. “First of all, Fujii-san did a magnificent job in taking the top time in Q1 (Group B). But that also put some pressure on me – what’s more, I was nervous because I was running on the new tyres for the first time in qualifying, so I am especially happy with this result. I just want to thank everyone!”
The #61 Subaru BRZ R&D Sport had turned in the fastest time in practice, Q1 Group A, and it appeared that in Q2 Hideki Yamauchi would capture his record-breaking 15th career pole position. But a 1:34.882 was just six hundredths of a second short – Yamauchi and Takuto Iguchi will start on the third row.
The second row of the GT300 grid features one of GT300’s newest teams, the #7 CarGuy MKS Ferrari 296 GT3 (Zak O’Sullivan/Rikuto Kobayashi/Keita Sawa), and one of its oldest cars, the #5 Mach Syaken Air Buster MC86 (Yusuke Shiotsu/Iori Kimura). The #45 PONOS Ferrari 296 (Kei Cozzolino/Takuro Shinohara) rounded out the top five.
Several more GTA-GT300 cars packed the top ten with the #2 Hyper Water INGING Toyota GR86 (Yuui Tsutsumi/Hibiki Taira/Kazuhisa Urabe) in sixth, then the #52 Saitama Green Brave Toyota GR Supra (Hiroki Yoshida/Seita Nonaka), the #11 Gainer Tanax Nissan Fairlady Z (Ryuichiro Tomita/Kazuki Oki), and the #60 Syntium LM corsa Lexus LC500 (Hiroki Yoshimoto/Shunsuke Kohno/Reimei Ito)
The #87 Metalive S Lamborghini Huracán GT3 EVO2 (Kosuke Matsuura/Natsu Sakaguchi) qualified tenth, but the other JLOC machine, the #0 Venteny Huracán (Takashi Kogure/Yuya Motojima), will have to come from 22nd on the grid after missing the cut in Q1.
Notables include the 13th-place #56 Realize/Nissan Mechanic Challenge GT-R NISMO GT3 (Kohei Hirate/Yu Kanamaru), in Kanamaru’s first race deputising for João Paulo de Oliveira. Then in 18th, the #22 R’Qs Mercedes-AMG GT3 (Masaki Kano/Masaki Jyonai/Yuma Shoji) made Q2 for the first time in a SUPER GT event since 2014, a remarkable achievement for one of GT300’s smallest teams!
Images © GTA
