2019 SUPER FORMULA Round 4 Report

【SUPER FORMULA Round 4 / Fuji】

Rookies dominate wet Fuji race.
Alex Palou makes pole to win.

SUPER FORMULA Round 4

Date 2019/07/12-14
Venue Fuji Speedway
Weather Rain / Cloudy
Surface Wet
Race Lap 55Laps
(1Lap = 4,563m)
2019 SUPER FORMULA Round 3

The fourth round of the 2019 Super Formula series took place at Fuji Speedway. The race saw Alex Palou’s maiden victory in his debut season with TCS Nakajima Racing, with only four events in the series under his belt. The Spaniard started from the pole position and led throughout the race.

Fuji Speedway had hosted one of the official group testing sessions during last winter. The conditions in the meeting held in March were favorable for setting faster lap times, considering how the conditions would influence the performance of tires, cars, and engines. While it was an unofficial record, the quickest time in the testing, 1’21”742, was better than the existing course record. So the expectations for the official new course record were high for this Fuji round.

Nick Cassidy (Vantelin Team Tom’s) set a slightly better time than the record in the practice session which was run on the dry track. But the qualifying session which counted was hit by rain, so it was impossible for any driver to set a new record this time.

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As the amount of rainfall fluctuated, the track conditions naturally were unstable. Therefore, the qualifying session became so challenging for every driver. The fastest one in the first 20-minute section, Q1, was Nirei Fukuzumi (Docomo Team Dandelion Racing). He is now a full-time Super Formula driver, after some occasional appearances last year. The 12 drivers who made their way into Q2 included three other rookies and the drivers with a proven track record, such as Cassidy and Yuhi Sekiguchi (Itochu Enex Team Impul).

Sekiguchi set the fastest time in Q2 and went on to the final section, Q3. And the three rookies, namely Palou, Sho Tsuboi (Jms P.Mu/Cerumo Inging), and Tadasuke Makino (TCS Nakajima Racing), and others followed him. Meanwhile, the reigning champion Naoki Yamamoto (Docomo Team Dandelion Racing) and a veteran Kazuki Nakajima (Vantelin Team Tom’s) lost out in Q2.

The rain became heavier when Q3 got underway. Under such conditions, Palou drove brilliantly and secured the pole position, following his teammate Makino’s feat in the season opener. With Tsuboi taking the second grid, the front row was locked out by the rookies and Sekiguchi followed them in third.

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The weather didn’t change much on the race day. The sky was covered with thick clouds, and the rain kept falling while it wasn’t so heavy at that point in time. To cope with such conditions, all drivers chose the wet tires for the start of the 55-lap race. As you may know, the rules on mandatory tire change wouldn’t be applied when the wet tires were used. And, in this race, most of the drivers covered the whole race distance with only one set of wet tires.

The race began with the Safety Car start procedures, and proper racing started from Lap 4. Palou kept the lead position and Tsuboi followed him in a thick cloud of spray from the Palou’s car, which confined the Japanese’s visibility. Behind Sekiguchi in third, Cassidy who was starting from the fifth grid closed the gap with Tomoki Nojiri (Team Mugen) and made a successful move during the second sector of the opening lap.

There were some spectacular battles everywhere from the beginning, but the most compelling examples were a series of overtaking by Kamui Kobayashi (Carrozzeria Team KCMG). Despite starting the race from the 19th grid because of an unconvincing performance in the qualifying session, his aggressive car set up for the race paid off, and he was already running in 12th on Lap 11. Then he steadily moved up to 11th on Lap 17 and tenth five laps later in a bid to finish in points.

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About halfway through the race, Kobayashi was involved in a close fight with Fukuzumi. The battle ended on Lap 34 when Fukuzumi went wide, and Kobayashi finally came up to eighth. He eventually finished the race in sixth, but his race from the back of the grids was well worth watching for the fans.

Palou was still leading the race and set a series of fast lap times, which were nearly one second faster than other drivers did. This was partly thanks to clear visibility as a privilege for the leader. Thus, the gap between Palou and Tsuboi was only increasing almost every lap.

On Lap 13, Palou became the first driver to set a lap time faster than 1’43” mark during the race and built a more than ten second gap with Tsuboi on Lap 15. Pushing so hard under the severe conditions, he sometimes made a small mistake and ran wide, but he never lost his momentum. As a result, he stayed well ahead of the pack until about the halfway point of the race, though he occasionally lost time to lap backmarkers.

Meanwhile, no mandatory tire change meant no refueling for most of the drivers, and they faced a situation that required them to save fuel. Because of the Safety Car start and the wet conditions, the race pace had to be relatively slow, so almost all drivers chose no stop strategy when they started the race.

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Tsuboi was well aware of it from the beginning and kept a steady pace during the first half of the race. Therefore, he had some reserve to close the gap with Palou, and it reduced to 7.6 seconds from 13 seconds at a maximum.

The same could be said to Cassidy. As Sekiguchi had to make a stop to add a small amount of fuel, the New Zealander moved up to third and started to come close rapidly to Tsuboi in the final part of the race. The gap between two diminished from 4.6 seconds on Lap 44 to just 0.4 seconds on Lap 50. The tail-to-nose battle between them in the last few laps naturally attracted much attention.

Cassidy tried to make a move against Tsuboi at the final corner a few times and fought the position down to Turn 1, both using the overtake system on their cars. The rookie Tsuboi, however, managed to fend off the attack by the winner of the opening round to keep the second place.

The battle behind him certainly helped Palou, and he could control his pace to save fuel. Because of the slow pace, the maximum race duration was going to pass before he would complete the prescribed race distance, so the race control decided to terminate the race at the end of Lap 53. Being about 13 seconds ahead of Tsuboi, Palou won his first-ever Super Formula race victory. And this was the long-awaited win for TCS Nakajima Racing, as this stopped their nine-year victory drought in the Japanese domestic top formula!

ENGINEER VOICE

Noritaka Koguchi [THE YOKOHAMA RUBBER CO., LTD.]

“Although it’s already the middle of July, the temperatures were lower than expected. After trying some long runs, some teams might think the soft tires would last long enough for the race, in terms of wear rate. But the temperatures looked to raise, while it was still lower than usual, the medium tire’s peak performance was getting closer to that of the soft. It meant that the medium could be better under certain circumstances, so it was a shame we didn’t have an opportunity to use the slick tires in the qualifying session and the race.

“As for the wet tires, they tended to be a bit difficult to use because it wasn’t easy to keep them in the right working temperature window once they were warmed up. We are sorry for that, as it made the teams’ and the drivers’ life tougher. The performance during the race seemed to be consistent, but I supposed everyone might feel the performance level wasn’t good enough. Seeing the positive side, we figured out what our wet tires needed through the weekend, and the way to go in the future development work is getting more specific.

“We expect a much hotter race in the next round at Motegi. I hope to see an interesting race because somewhere in the race, the medium tires could become faster than the soft in a way to make the race more exciting.”