【SUPER FORMULA Round 5 / Motegi】

Reigning champ does exactly what he says.
Hiroaki Ishiura gets season’s first win from pole.

SUPER FORMULA Round 5

Date	2018/08/18-19
Venue	Twinring Motegi
Weather	Fine
Surface	Dry
Race Lap	52Laps (1Lap = 4,801m)

• >>Report
• >>Result

In the midst of the summer holiday season, Twin Ring Motegi welcomed more family spectators than any other races for the fifth round of Super Formula series. This was partly because the circuit hosted the Enjoy Honda event, which was enjoyable for Honda fans of all ages, at the same time.

The weather was fine and lovely on Saturday as though it was a day in early autumn, which contributed the top five cars in the qualifying session breaking the existing course record. On Sunday, the sky was overcast and was a bit more hot and humid but more than 20 thousand spectators at Motegi enjoyed the exciting race by the fastest cars in Japanese domestic motor racing, seeing a lot of thrilling battles.

During the practice session on Saturday morning, the reigning champion Hiroaki Ishiura (JMS P.Mu / Cerumo Inging) spun and halted on the track, which was a mistake he rarely makes. In the process, the set of medium tires he had been using were flat-spotted, so he had to run with the set of used soft tires for the rest of the session.

He ended the session in 12th, so things didn’t seem to be ideal for him. But the fact that he did more laps with the soft tires than any other drivers did, and thus collected a lot of data, influenced how things developed in the qualifying session and the race.

Ishiura made his way into Q2 with the sixth fastest time in Q1. Then he was second in the middle section by setting 1’31”747, which was the second fastest and was already faster than the existing course record. And, in Q3, he secured the pole position by renewing the record with 1’31”591.

When the race got underway on Sunday, the air/track temperatures were around 30/42 degrees Celsius which were well within the range in which the medium and soft tires supplied by Yokohama work properly.

The top four qualifiers, Ishiura, Tomoki Nojiri (Docomo Team Dandelion Racing), his teammate Nobuharu Matsushita, and Narain Karthikeyan (TCS Nakajima Racing), chose the soft tires for the start, hoping for a better getaway. On the other hand, Nick Cassidy (Kondo Racing) and Naoki Yamamoto (Team Mugen), who were qualified in fifth and seventh respectively, picked the medium for the first stint.

Ishiura led the field for the first few corners until Matsushita managed to pass him at Turn 5 by using Overtake System cleverly. This upset Cerumo Inging driver’s plan that was to hold on to his lead but he decided to stay there for the time being, preserving his tires behind Matsushita. So they went on in this order for a while, keeping around one second gap between them.

Nojiri was running in third in the early stage. However, he lost the position to Ryo Hirakawa (Itochu Enex Team Impul) at Turn 1 on the eighth lap. Despite starting from the ninth grid, Hirakawa was already in fourth on Lap 4, as he took a two-stop strategy to make the most of faster pace of the soft tires.

Then Nojiri made his first pit stop, after closing the gap with the race leaders significantly. And, with a set of fresh soft tires, he continued to drive in a tremendous pace and already got back to third, behind Ishiura, on Lap 26.

Meanwhile, there was no position change between the leaders since then. But it was Matsushita who made a move first and came in to the pit on Lap 27 of the 52-lap race.

With clear space ahead of him, Ishiura just started to push. While his lap times were around 1’37” when he was behind Matsushita, he bettered it almost one second on Lap 28 and then set 1’35”8 on the next lap, which was amazing if you consider that he was running on the same soft tires from the start. It was probably thanks to his better knowledge from the practice session about the soft.

Thus his attempt to overcut Matsushita worked. After every driver behind him had done their pit stop, Ishiura made his stop at the end of Lap 40 and resumed racing as the race leader, also helped by the team’s perfect job at the stop.

There was a 6.2 second gap with Hirakawa who was in second at the time, so Ishiura could control his pace to cruise to his first win of the season. The pole-to-win gave him the maximum points possible in an event and kept his title hope alive by closing the gap with top two in the point standings, although his championship position remained the same.

Finishing in second, Hirakawa gained most positions among the 19 competitors in this race and earned a lot of points, which sent him up to fourth in the point standings. The last corner of the podium was taken by Cassidy who became the championship leader with this result.