【SUPER GT Round 1 / Okayama】

WedsSport ADVAN RC F gets point in wet season opener.
Audi R8 LMS ultra makes podium finish after spending 2014 season struggling.

SUPER GT Round 1

Date	2015/04/04-05
Venue	Okayama Int’l Circuit
Weather	Cloudy / Rainy
Surface	Wet
Race Lap	82Laps (1Lap = 3,703ｍ)

• >>Report
• >>Result

With the significant progress in development of GT500 cars and their engines after the extensive regulation changes in 2014, the 2015 Super GT series can expect better races with faster cars in its second season under the new GT500 regulations. The curtain raiser of the new season, Okayama GT 300km Race, was held at Okayama International Circuit on April 4-5, 2015.

Yokohama Tire supplies its ADVAN racing tires for the two GT500 cars, WedsSport ADVAN RC F and D’station ADVAN GT-R, again this year. Regarding the GT300 class which has a wide variety of car models, a lot of FIA GT3 cars, such as Mercedes Benz SLS AMG GT3, Nissan GT-R Nismo GT3, and BMW Z4 GT3, as well as the so-called “mother chassis” cars which complies with the JAF GT specifications, use Yokohama Tire’s products. The mother chassis cars have been developed since last year and 2015 is the first proper racing season for them.

Okayama prefecture is famous for normally good weather conditions, but it doesn’t seem to apply to the Super GT race weekend. For the first weekend of April this year, the weather forecast said the chances for rain would be rather high, which meant that at least some parts of track activities would be affected by rain for the third consecutive year. But the forecast turned out to be wrong for Saturday. While the teams had to rely on the wet tires in the beginning of the first practice session because of rainfall on Friday night, they could run on the slick tires for the rest of the day, including the official qualifying session.

The qualifying session was run in the knock out system format which has become the norm over these years. In the GT300 class, being led by Seiji Ara in Studie BMW Z4, ten out of 13 cars which advanced to Q2 were Yokohama Tire users. Then, in the subsequent Q2 section, Takeshi Tsuchiya in VivaC 86 MC, which is one of the mother chassis cars, was the leading Yokohama equipped driver and was fourth fastest in the class. The reigning champion Nobuteru Taniguchi changed the car from BMW to Mercedes for this season and his Goodsmile Hatsune Miku SLS ended the session in seventh.

The rain started to fall on Saturday evening. And, on Sunday, it was raining on and off through the day and the track surfaces never dried until the race ended. The warm up session on Sunday morning was run on the totally wet pavement, so everyone had no choice but to use the wet tires. In this session, Tomonobu Fujii in Audi R8 LMS ultra was the fastest driver, followed by Naoki Yokomizo in KSF Direction Ferrari 458. As both of them were running on Yokohama’s wet tires, the expectations for some good results in the race grew among the Yokohama equipped teams.

The race began at 2:30 p.m. The rain had ceased when the cars sat on the grids but the track surfaces were still very wet. While some teams took a gamble choosing the slick tires, hoping that the track would be drying, they lost the gamble because, as it turned out, the surface never became dry enough for the slicks.

The starting drivers of the Yokohama shoed GT500 cars were Daiki Sasaki for D’station ADVAN GT-R which took the 12th grid and Yuhi Sekiguchi for WedsSport ADVAN RC F. Since the conditions were so tricky, many drivers made mistakes but Sasaki and Sekiguchi kept staying on the track and drove steadily. During their stints, it turned out that the tires they had chosen at the start seemed to last longer than expected, so both teams decided to extend their stints as long as possible.

Therefore, they were the last ones to make a mandatory pit stops. Sekiguchi came in to the pit on Lap 48 of the 82 lap race to hand the car to Juichi Wakisaka. After having a mechanical problem on his car in the early stage, Sasaki followed the path on the next lap when he was running in 12th and changed to Lucas Ordonez who went out on the track in the same position.

WedsSport ADVAN RC F resumed racing in seventh without replacing the tires at the pit stop. So Wakisaka might have finished the race around that position, if the track conditions hadn’t changed because of the rain which started to fall again soon after the pit stop. Nevertheless, he made every possible effort to get a valuable championship point and eventually finished the race in tenth. On the other hand, D’station ADVAN GT-R had to continue with the unsolved problem and ended the race in 11th, just one place shy of a point finish.

In the GT300 class, the starting driver of Goodsmile Hatsune Miku SLS, Tatsuya Kataoka, jumped up from seventh to fourth during the opening lap. He was followed by Tsuchiya in VivaC 86 MC and Yokomizo in KSF Direction Ferrari 458 and, shortly after that, Richard Lyons driving Audi R8 LMS ultra joined this this group. Unfortunately, Ara in Studie BMW Z4 lost control of the car even before completing the first lap and went off the track. He managed to bring the wrecked car back to the pit but the team was forced to retire because the damage was too heavy to repair quickly.

Using another manufacturer’s slick tires, Bjorn Wirdheim in Gainer Tanax SLS was running in second in the early stage but it was clearly a wrong call and the Mercedes driver was slipping down the field. The pole sitting Andre Couto in Gainer Tanax GT-R also struggled to keep a good pace, which led to giving up the lead position only after two laps, and then he found himself in fourth on Lap 13. Instead, Lyons moved up to third and, surprisingly, Christian Mamerow in a sister car, Racing Tech Audi R8, came up to fourth on Lap 15 from the 17th grid at the start! Thus, the two Audi R8s were now in tandem.

After their pit stops, Fujii in Audi R8 LMS ultra rejoined the race in third and Shinya Hosokawa now at the wheel of Racing Tech Audi R8 in fifth, mainly because the FIA GT3 cars need a little bit more time to refuel than the JAF GT cars do. But Hosokawa regained the fourth place on Lap 69 and the two Audi R8s finished the race in third and fourth. As Taniguchi in Goodsmile Hatsune Miku SLS and Takamitsu Matsui in VivaC 86 MC followed in fifth and sixth, Yokohama shoed GT300 cars took up four places in the top six, from third to sixth.