The wait is finally over. TGR Team KeePer Cerumo, Hiroaki Ishiura, and Toshiki Oyu won Sunday’s SUPER GT Fuji 3 Hours Race: GW Special to break the Cerumo team’s painful six-year winless drought – and they didn’t just win, they dominated from pole position in their #38 KeePer Cerumo Toyota GR Supra.
Fuji Speedway was the setting – the site of SUPER GT’s annual Golden Week classic since 1994. Over 82,000 spectators made their way through the gates over two days, including just under 50,000 on a beautiful, warm spring race day.
Those thousands of fans came to Fuji Speedway expecting Ishiura and Oyu to put on a strong showing. Somehow, their #38 KeePer GR Supra was fully repaired after Ishiura’s heavy crash in the first lap of the season-opening round at Okayama. With no Success Weight to burden them, Oyu won the pole position on Saturday and was determined to lead the opening phase of the race.
The young driver in his second year with the Toyota Gazoo Racing factory led fellow Toyota driver Yuji Kunimoto and the rest of the GT500 field into turn one and quickly sprinted away. The #19 WedsSport Advan GR Supra of Kunimoto fought to keep the two ARTA Honda Civic Type R-GTs behind him early on, allowing the #38 car to build a ten-second lead in less than 30 minutes of racing.
Shortly after, contact between two GT300 cars – the #62 HELM GT-R of Reiji Hiraki and the #87 Metalive Huracán of Natsu Sakaguchi – broke the left-rear suspension on the Nissan. Hiraki stopped at the exit of turn two and brought out a Full Course Yellow. It was the only interruption of the race, which ran green the rest of the way.
Oyu extended his lead while Kunimoto’s pace began to sink in comparison to the hard-charging Yuhi Sekiguchi and Sho Tsuboi. Sekiguchi, who started eighth in the #39 Denso Kobelco SARD GR Supra, gained three places on the first lap, and at the 55-minute mark, Sekiguchi overtook Kunimoto for second place. Tsuboi drove the #1 au TOM’S GR Supra to third place after getting past Kunimoto and the #16 ARTA Mugen Civic of Hiroki Otsu.
And with Ukyo Sasahara and Nirei Fukuzumi working their way up the field, Toyota briefly had a top-six lockout in GT500.
The #38 KeePer GR Supra came in after 40 laps for fuel and tyres. Oyu entered the pits with a 20-second lead, and after the pit cycle, he was still leading – but the #8 ARTA Civic of Tomoki Nojiri was a bit closer, having undercut the field with an early first stop.
Oyu’s gap to his former Honda stablemate Nojiri grew, however, up to 23 seconds. With an hour and eight minutes left, both drivers came in for their final pit stops and handed the car over to their co-drivers. In the middle stages, GT500’s best battle was the duel for third place between the #1 au GR Supra of Kenta Yamashita, who was doing well to hold off the #3 Niterra Motul Z of Atsushi Miyake in fourth for several laps.
Yamashita inherited the lead until he pitted with 55 minutes to go. By the end of the second pit cycle, race leader Ishiura was 34 seconds ahead of the field and just needed to run a clean final stint to secure the victory.
Ishiura and Oyu completed 116 laps in three hours, leading 99 of them and never relinquishing their control over the race. After 2,192 days, the #38 Cerumo Toyota was back on the top step of the GT500 podium. Not only was Ishiura relieved to have won again for the first time in six years, but Oyu was overcome with emotion after taking his first win as a Toyota works driver.
“We owe this win to the team for working hard to repair the car,” Oyu said, after his second career GT500 win. “Because I was running in the lead, I had a good view of the fans and the KeePer cheering section waving their flags, which gave me the strength to carry on. I am so glad that we were able to win here at Fuji.”
It was Ishiura’s seventh career win, his first since he and Yuji Tachikawa – now the Team Director of Cerumo – won this event together in 2019. “This victory is one we owe to the team and to my teammate Oyu, who got us into a runaway lead from the start. In the second half of the race, all I had to do was drive while keeping an eye on the cars behind me. Still, there has never been such a rewarding win as this for me. After I got out of the car at the end and saw the tears in Oyu’s eyes, I started crying as well!”
Tsuboi and Yamashita finished second in the #1 au TOM’S GR Supra while carrying 40 kilogrammes of Success Weight. They were one position short of capturing an unprecedented fourth SUPER GT race victory in a row, but they were very happy to have taken a fourth straight GT500 podium in a Toyota 1-2 finish.
Most importantly, the 15 points earned today allowed Tsuboi and Yamashita to extend their lead in the GT500 Drivers’ Championship before Sepang.
Third place was hotly contested right down to the wire between two teams that had lacklustre qualifying results, but it was the #100 Stanley Honda Civic Type R-GT of Naoki Yamamoto and Tadasuke Makino that took the final podium place. With 20 minutes left, Makino approached the #12 TRS Impul Z of Kazuki Hiramine.
After several laps of pursuit, Makino made a forceful lunge at Dunlop Corner to grab the spot and take Honda’s first podium of 2025, from 13th on the grid.
The #12 TRS Z of Hiramine and Bertrand Baguette gained eight places – from 12th to fourth – and was the best of the Nissans.
Sekiguchi and Sacha Fenestraz completed the top five in their #39 Denso GR Supra, followed by the #14 Eneos X Prime GR Supra (Kazuya Oshima/Nirei Fukuzumi) in sixth and the #37 Deloitte TOM’S GR Supra (Ukyo Sasahara/Giuliano Alesi) in seventh.
It was a difficult result for the two flagship NISMO Z-cars: The #23 Motul Autech Z (Katsumasa Chiyo/Mitsunori Takaboshi) at least recovered from 15th to eighth, but the #3 Niterra Z of Miyake and Daiki Sasaki dropped to tenth. Sasaki was fortunate to salvage a point after being spun by Ren Sato, who received a post-race time penalty that took the #16 ARTA Civic down to 11th. As for the #8 of Nojiri and Nobuharu Matsushita, the orange ARTA Civic tumbled down the order due to a lack of grip in Matsushita’s final stint.
The #19 WedsSport GR Supra was 14th after a puncture forced them to take an unscheduled pit stop, though at least Kazuto Kotaka got to run his first GT500 race stint alongside co-drivers Kunimoto and Sena Sakaguchi.
Tsuboi/Yamashita lead Ishiura/Oyu by 14 points after two races.
GT300 produced one of the most dramatic finishes of the racing season, and an incredible winner. From 27th on the grid, the #6 Uni-Robo Bluegrass Ferrari 296 GT3 of Yoshiaki Katayama and Roberto Merhi scored its first win in SUPER GT.
Early on, it was Tomonobu Fujii who led the race in the pole-sitting #777 D’station Aston Martin Vantage GT3, from Hideki Yamauchi in the #61 Subaru BRZ R&D Sport. There was early drama at the start of the race, after first-corner contact between the #11 Gainer Z of Ryuichiro Tomita and the #666 seven x seven Porsche of Kiyoto Fujinami sent the yellow Porsche for a spin.
And also on the opening lap, the #0 Venteny Lamborghini Huracán GT3 EVO2 (Takashi Kogure/Yuya Motojima) suffered a right-rear suspension problem and retired from the race, a hammer blow to their title hopes.
Merhi was the driver to watch in the opening stint. He was knocked out in Q1 and then had his best time deleted due to a track limits infringement, which sent him all the way to the back row. But in 15 minutes, Merhi was up into the top ten, and in just 40 minutes, he’d overtaken five more cars to grab fifth place!
Meanwhile, two cars came in before the FCY (for the #62 HELM GT-R’s accident and stoppage) – the #45 PONOS Ferrari of Kei Cozzolino and the #65 LEON Pyramid Mercedes-AMG of Naoya Gamou.
Fujii pitted the #777 D’station Vantage from the lead after 55 minutes, and Merhi came in on the same lap for his first stop. Two laps later, Yamauchi pitted the #61 Subaru BRZ from the lead. Once Hibiki Taira brought the #2 Hyper Water INGING Toyota GR86 in from the lead, the #45 PONOS Ferrari of Cozzolino was leading GT300.
Yet the pace of the D’station Vantage was too strong. Having overtaken the #65 LEON Pyramid AMG of Togo Suganami for net second place, Fujii quickly ran down an 11-second gap to Cozzolino and overtook the Ferrari for the class lead at the halfway point.
Only minutes later, the left-rear tyre of the D’station Vantage came apart coming out of the final corner – several GT300 teams had tyre problems during the race, but this changed the complexion of the race. Fujii came in for a full-service pit stop, and Charlie Fagg boarded the #777 Aston Martin with about 85 minutes left, and the #61 Subaru BRZ of Yamauchi inherited the lead.
Co-driver Takuto Iguchi took over for the final stint in the #61 Subaru with just over an hour remaining. The #2 Hyper Water GR86, now in the hands of Yuui Tsutsumi, ran another long stint before making a fuel-only stop with 33 minutes left. That cycled Fagg and the D’station Vantage to a 16-second lead.
Unfortunately, 85 minutes was too long on one tank of fuel for the D’station Vantage to reach the finish. Fagg had to come in for a splash of fuel with 12 minutes to go, and Iguchi cycled to the lead, about ten seconds ahead of Merhi in second place.
But with Subaru and R&D Sport’s first win since the 2022 Fuji Summer race within reach, disaster struck in the form of a catastrophic engine failure on the final lap. Iguchi crawled to a stop at Dunlop Corner, got out, and sat behind the protective barriers with his head in his hands, devastated.
Merhi took the lead with less than half a lap to go to complete one of SUPER GT’s greatest comeback drives, from 27th to first.
The magnitude of the win was significant on several levels. It was the first GT300 win for both Katayama and Merhi, and for Velorex (formerly Team LeMans) since it became an independent GT300 squad in 2021.
And for Ferrari, this win finally brought a 16-year drought in SUPER GT to a close. The last time a Ferrari had won in the series was in November 2009, when Fujii and Takayuki Aoki took the Daishin Advan F430 to ‘P1’ in the season finale at Motegi! Since then, Ferrari’s participation had dwindled – even stopped for a time – but now a modern Ferrari GT3 car has won in GT300 for the first time.
Merhi recalls: “After starting from 27th position, I thought it would be good if we could get up to tenth place or so, but I still wanted to try for more than that. Once I started driving, the car ran so well, but the Subaru and the Aston Martin were also very fast. I didn’t want to give up, so I kept pushing and was able to pass the #61 car when it suffered machine trouble.
“Today is Mother’s Day in Spain, so I want to dedicate this win to myself and Yoshiaki’s mother,” he added.
“In my stint, I was able to move us up through the pack to some degree, but we owe a lot to the way Roberto moved us up so fast in the early stages,” said Katayama. “I thought we had the potential to win, and I didn’t want us to settle for second or third place, because we had suffered a lot up until now. I am simply very glad that we were able to get this long-awaited win.
D’station Racing settled for second place after their strategy was compromised due to the untimely puncture, but showed tremendous pace despite the trouble – Fujii and Fagg led 48 laps and took big points after being knocked out of the lead fight in Okayama.
Third place on the road went to the #7 CarGuy MKS Ferrari of Zak O’Sullivan and Rikuto Kobayashi. Kobayashi overtook the #2 Hyper Water GR86 of Tsutsumi with just six minutes left to secure the position.
But after the race, the #7 Ferrari received a post-race time penalty for having too many mechanics working on the car during refuelling. That ten-second penalty swapped the positions and gave third place back to the #2 GR86 of Tsutsumi, Taira, and third driver Kazuhisa Urabe (though Urabe, who did not drive, will not be credited with a first career podium in his first entry.) O’Sullivan, Kobayashi, and Keita Sawa (did not run) were fourth after the penalty.
Then it was the two early stoppers, the #65 LEON Pyramid AMG of Gamou and Suganami in fifth, followed by the #45 PONOS Ferrari of Cozzolino and Takuro Shinohara in sixth. The #56 Realize/Nissan Mechanic Challenge GT-R (Kohei Hirate/Yu Kanamaru) was seventh in Kanamaru’s debut race.
After retiring with six corners to go, the #61 Subaru BRZ was credited with an eighth-place finish, ahead of the #4 Goodsmile Hatsune Miku AMG (Nobuteru Taniguchi/Tatsuya Kataoka) in ninth. This was the 172nd and final race in a 21-year iron man streak for both Taniguchi and Kataoka, who will step out of the cockpit for Sepang and head to Spa-Francorchamps in June.
Then in tenth place was the #5 Mach Syaken Air Buster MC86 (Yusuke Shiotsu/Iori Kimura), which collected Team Mach’s first points and first top-ten finish since 2022.
Also scoring points were the #26 Anest Iwata Racing Lexus RC F GT3 (Igor Fraga/Hironobu Yasuda), #360 RunUp Rivaux GT-R (Takayuki Aoki/Rin Arakawa/Hironobu Shimizu), #96 K-tunes RC F GT3 (Morio Nitta/Shinichi Takagi), #11 Gainer Tanax Nissan Fairlady Z (Ryuichiro Tomita/Kazuki Oki) and #60 Syntium LM corsa Lexus LC500 (Hiroki Yoshimoto/Shunsuke Kohno/Reimei Ito).
Gamou and Shinohara take an 11-point lead in the GT300 standings ahead of today’s winners, Katayama and Merhi.
Up next is SUPER GT’s much-anticipated return to Petronas Sepang International Circuit in Malaysia, on 27/28 June.
Images © GTA
