【SUPER GT Round 4 / SUGO】

Bad weather upsets Sugo race weekend time table.
ManePa Lamborghini GT3 wins GT300 class to head Yokohama’s top 10 sweep!!

SUPER GT Round 4

Date	2014/07/19-07/20
Venue	Sportsland SUGO
Weather	Cloudy
Surface	Dry
Race Lap	79Laps (1Lap = 3,704ｍ)

• >>Report
• >>Result

The fourth round of 2014 Super GT series, Sugo GT 300km Race, was held at Sportsland SUGO on July 19-20. Located in a mountainous region, as with Autopolis which had hosted the previous round, Sugo naturally has a lot of elevation changes in its track layout. The weather and track conditions were so variable over the weekend, which caused the teams to have a hard time in many ways.

It was drizzling intermittently on Saturday. A thick fog came when the qualifying session was about to start. The organizers delayed the start of the session a few times and waited for improvement of the weather but, eventually, they had to reschedule the qualifying session on Sunday morning.

It was raining again on Sunday in the morning hours. When the qualifying session for the GT300 cars got underway, the track was still wet and the cars were throwing up slight water spray. But the rain stopped then and the track conditions were improving.

Most of the drivers chose the intermediate tires for their qualifying attempts. At the end of the session, Jorg Bergmeister in Puma KRH Porsche was the fastest Yokohama shoed driver and 5th in the class, followed by Koji Yamanishi in CrystalCroco Lamborghini GT3 in 6th.

In the qualifying session for the GT500 cars, which immediately followed the session for the lesser class, Yuhi Sekiguchi and Michael Krumm were at the wheel of WedsSport ADVAN RC F and D’station ADVAN GT-R respectively. Although Sekiguchi did his utmost from the beginning of the session, setting 1’21”815, which was the 14th fastest in the class, on his 5th lap was all he could do. Krumm lost some valuable time during the session, due to a problem relating to the car’s transmission, and had to settle for 15th with 1’22”441.

Prior to the start of the 81 lap race on 2 p.m., the rain had almost stopped. All cars in both classes, therefore, were running on the slick tires when they left the grids for the formation lap but then it started to rain again.

The race control decided to make two extra formation laps to avoid starting the race with cold tires on the damp track but, during these two laps, the rain became even heavier. So several GT500 drivers, including Sekiguchi in WedsSport ADVAN RC F, headed to their pits to change to the rain tires as soon as the race – now reduced to 79 laps – officially started. D’station ADVAN GT-R with Daiki Sasaki at the wheel, on the other hand, chose to stay on the track with the slick tires. As a result, Sasaki’s GT-R moved up to 8th when he completed the first lap of the race, while Sekiguchi was running in 15th after the pit stop.

Naturally, Sasaki struggled for the early stage of the race because he stuck to the slicks, but his pace was improving, as the rain stopped and the track surfaces were getting drier. On Lap 12, D’station ADVAN GT-R came up to 7th and kept the position for more than 20 laps. Although the Japanese driver lost a few positions while he battled against Petronas Tom’s RC F and Denso Kobelco Sard RC F, he drove strongly for 51 laps from the start before coming in the pit to change to Krumm.

Sekiguchi went off the track at Turn 4 on Lap 7 when he was gaining positions from the bottom of the field. Plus, he had to make another pit stop to change the tires back to the slick, as the rain stopped earlier than the team had expected, which sent him back to the wrong end of the field. But he endured his long and hard stint well, setting his best lap time, 1’14”552, during the stint, and came back to the pit on Lap 52 to hand the car to Juichi Wakisaka for the rest of the race.

When the whole field completed the mandatory driver changes, Krumm was in 11th and Wakisaka in 12th. In the closing stage, the rain came back again, so both drivers decided to switch to the rain tires but, unfortunately, this didn’t lead to a big gain for them because the race eased off soon after that. At the end of the day, D’station ADVAN GT-R finished the race in 10th and earned a valuable point, while WedsSport ADVAN RC F saw the checkered flag in 12th.

In the GT300 class, the decisive factor was how the teams reacted to the rain during the extra formation laps. As was the case in the GT500 class, some drivers, including Tatsuya Kataoka who normally makes the most of a surprise strategy in Goodsmile Hatsune Miku Z4, chose to switch to the rain tires as soon as the race got underway, only to come back to the pit to get back to the slicks.

In such a chaotic situation, Hideto Yasuoka in Wako’s Exe Aston Martin jumped up from the 8th grid to 3rd during the opening lap. Then Subaru BRZ R&D Sport once overtook him but Yasuoka hit back on Lap 7 to regain the 3rd place. His pace was getting even better, as the track conditions improved, and he found himself in 2nd on Lap 16. Three laps later, he finally managed to get the lead position by overtaking Gainer Dixcel SLS at Turn 1, which involved a slight contact between them.

Yasuoka pulled away from the rest of the field and built a huge gap that should have been enough to remain in the lead, even after making the pit stop to change to Masaki Kano. When Yasuoka came back to the pit on Lap 43, however, the team had to replace the car’s rear wheels and tires, because one of them was slightly damaged, despite their plan was forgoing the tire change at the stop. To make matters worse, Kano had a problem with the gearbox when he tried to leave the pit, which resulted in losing considerable time.

This gave the lead position to Manabu Orido in ManePa Lamborghini GT3. His partner, Takayuki Aoki, had done a great drive in the first half of the race and was already in 2nd when he handed the car to Orido. On top of this, the team made additional gains at the pit stop by not replacing the tires.

The return of rain didn’t stop Orido either and, even when he made a mistake at the back straight end on Lap 60, he could rejoin the race without losing the lead position. When the checkered flag fell, ManePa Lamborghini GT3 was the only GT300 car that completed 74 laps. Orido and Aoki put a period to their long victory drought in the Super GT series since 2009.

The Kurosawa brothers, Haruki and Tsubasa, in Leon SLS finished in 2nd, followed by Richard Lyons/Tomonobu Fujii pair in Audi R8 LMS ultra, which meant the GT300 podium was swept by Yokohama shoed cars. As another confirmation of Yokohama’s strength in the changeable and difficult track conditions, seven more cars that used the Yokohama tires rounded out the top 10 of the race.