【SUPER GT Round 1 / Okayama】

Yokohama shoed GT300 cars make podium clean sweep in Okayama.
WedsSport ADVAN RC F extends continuous point finish to eleven.

SUPER GT Round 1

Date	2016/04/09-10
Venue	Okayama Int’l Circuit
Weather	Cloudy
Surface	Dry
Race Lap	82Laps (1Lap = 3,703ｍ)

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The 2016 Super GT series started with a race at Okayama International Circuit in the northern part of Okayama prefecture, Okayama GT300km Race, again this year.

For this new season, Yokohama Tire continues to supply the same two cars from last year, WedsSport ADVAN RC F and Forum Engineering ADVAN GT-R which is still run by Kondo Racing but under a new sponsorship deal.

But there were changes in driver lineups for both cars. Masataka Yanagida joined Kondo Racing to be paired with Daiki Sasaki who stayed with the team. And, following Jyuichi Wakisaka’s retirement from top-line drive, Yuji Kunimoto filled the vacancy to share the WedsSport backed car with Yuhi Sekiguchi.

Yanagida is a well-known veteran in the Super GT series and won the GT500 championship in 2012, after winning the GT300 title in 2003 and 2010, so he definitely knows what to do in this series. Another positive factor is the fact that he had driven for Kondo Racing for two years from 2006. This means a majority of the team’s senior members know him very well and they could trust him from the first day of his new stint with the team.

Yanagida emphatically said, “I rejoined the team after ten years’ absence but I already feel comfortable. And I immediately noticed they have become an even better team. So if I could be of any help for the team, I think we would be able to fight for the championship.”

Kunimoto has been a regular GT500 driver since 2012 and already knew the taste of champagne at the top slot of a podium. He is also a reliable new recruit for the team led by Masataka Bandoh.

Many of the GT300 teams that run the FIA-GT cars have switched to new cars this year. While most of them had had some testing beforehand, this was the very first race for them with brand new cars. This meant there were more unknown factors than they had over recent years, so many had said that the season opener might become a quite eventful race.

The teams were welcomed by fine weather on the qualifying day and the slick tires were the obvious choice for every competitor to use for their qualifying attempts. In the GT300 class, VivaC 86 MC secured the pole position. Takamitsu Matsui at the wheel of the car in Q1 narrowly got through it with the 13th fastest time but Takeshi Tsuchiya set the course record in Q2, thanks to the set up change after Q1.

Naoya Gamou in Leon CVSTOS AMG-GT and Seiji Ara in Studie BMW M6 also significantly bettered their teammates’ position in Q1 in a similar way. They put their cars on the second and third grid respectively, rounding out Yokohama’s top three domination. The nine cars out of 14 that went on to Q2 were Yokohama users.

Unfortunately, Yanagida didn’t even have an opportunity to drive Forum Engineering ADVAN GT-R in the qualifying session, as his teammate’s qualifying time in Q1 was the tenth fastest, which meant the car failed to get through to Q2. To be fair to Sasaki, this was the very first time for him, after joining in this team two years ago, to do a qualifying attack on the dry surface at this track, since the Okayama rounds had always been hit by rain for the last two years.

WedsSport ADVAN RC F had a rather good qualifying session. Sekiguchi did a great job by setting the seventh fastest time in Q1, which was good enough to make the car’s way into Q2, while Kunimoto couldn’t remain in the position and ended Q2 in eighth.

The sky was overcast on Sunday morning. It wasn’t so cold but the air and surface temperatures were somewhat lower than expected when the time to start the race approached. Forum Engineering ADVAN GT-R started the race with Yanagida at the wheel but he struggled to keep up with the cars in front of him.

In contrast, Sekiguchi in WedsSport ADVAN RC F looked to be in a good form in the early stage. He moved up to sixth after making successful moves on Lap 7 and 9 and then joined the fight for fifth. His performance at that stage was certainly remarkable but the momentum didn’t last long and his pace was gradually slowing.

The team decided to call him in a few laps earlier than planned, on Lap 36, and sent Kunimoto out for the second half of the race. However, the fresh tires didn’t improve the situation which made Kunimoto’s job harder and all he could do was finishing the race in ninth. But they still earned the championship points and extended their continuous point finish record to eleven races since the Thai round in 2014.

Yanagida in Forum Engineering ADVAN GT-R came in to the pit as scheduled on Lap 41. The team gave Sasaki the tires with a different type of compound from those used by Yanagida and hoped he could fight back with them. But the tire choice backfired because of a significant temperature change and he had to settle for finishing the race in lowly 13th, two laps down from the winner, which was disappointing.

Tsuchiya led the first part of race in GT300. He managed to pull away from the rest of the field in the early stage but then Haruki Kurosawa’s Leon CVSTOS AMG-GT came close to the tail of ViVaC 86 MC. After following it closely for a while, Kurosawa changed his mind and made his pit stop earlier than planned to undercut his direct rival.

This was the turning point of the race. After the driver change from Kurosawa to Gamou on Lap 31, the AMG driver succeeded to overtake Matsui in the 86 MC three laps later, when the latter was still in the course of warming up his tires properly, and eventually won the race.

Behind them, there had been a lengthy battle between Studie BMW M6 and GoodSmile Hatsune Miku AMG. The two cars made their pit stop at the same time in this order, on Lap 35, but Nobuteru Taniguchi in the AMG was ahead of Ara at the wheel of the BMW when they resumed racing.

After losing the position when he was still in the pit lane, Ara finished the race in third, following to Taniguchi, as Matsui slipped down the pecking order and ended the race in sixth. Morio Nitta in JMS LMcorsa 488 GT3 gradually come up through the field, after he was handed the car from Akihiro Tsuzuki on Lap 25, and crossed the line in fifth.