Suzuka Post-Race Notebook
Photo: Gruppe C Photography/SRO
***The 49th running of the Suzuka 1000km ran to 170 laps over the six-and-a-half hour duration, falling three laps shy of the distance required to reach 1000km. The actual distance covered by the lead lap cars was 987.19km.
***Both Kelvin van der Linde and Raffaele Marciello won at Suzuka for the second time aboard the No. 32 Team WRT BMW M4 GT3 EVO while Weerts won for the first time. WRT meanwhile made it back-to-back wins after its 2019 triumph with an Audi R8 LMS GT3 Evo, when van der Linde was also part of the lineup.
***Augusto Farfus says he has no real explanation for why the sixth-placed No. 31 WRT BMW, which he shared with Suzuka debutants Max Hesse and Dan Harper, couldn’t match the pace of the winning sister car.
***Farfus told Sportscar365: “It was a difficult weekend. We were down on top speed and we struggled a lot with the balance. The team made a massive effort to understand, but being so far from home, we don’t have the resources we would normally have for a European race. We just couldn’t figure it out, which is a shame.”
***The IGTC drivers’ championship race can now only be mathematically won by a BMW driver, with only next month’s season-closing Indianapolis 8 Hour to go, with van der Linde, Marciello and Farfus all still in contention on 85, 80 and 72 points respectively. Weerts moves up to fourth in the standings on 53 points, but sharing a car with van der Linde and Marciello this weekend meant there was no way he could catch his co-drivers.
***The best-placed Porsche driver in the standings, Alessio Picariello, is not only out of the running for the IGTC title after finishing fourth at Suzuka for Origine Motorsport, but can now no longer finish any higher than fourth in the standings.
***Porsche could still beat BMW to the manufacturers’ crown, with the two German brands split by 18 points with 43 available at Indianapolis. Mercedes-AMG is now too far behind to catch BMW after another IGTC race to forget, as its top finisher was the No. 888 GruppeM entry of Maxime Martin, Mikael Grenier and Luca Stolz in seventh.
***Martin said the Three-Pointed Star was “never in the fight” against BMW and Porsche, pinpointing a lack of straight line speed as a particular weakness.
***The Belgian told Sportscar365: “With our car we can’t pass, because we have no straight line speed, and when you see the difference in speed between the cars, it’s a joke. In the beginning we were ok with the heat, but the Porsche got faster through the race and BMW was the fastest from the beginning.”
***GruppeM attempted to go off-strategy by staying out under the second safety car period, only pitting when the race went back to green in what appeared to be an attempt to make one fewer stop than the competition, but any advantage was negated by the next caution barely 15 minutes later. “We made a mistake there,” said Martin.
***The No. 77 Craft-Bamboo Racing car that was second-best of the Mercedes-AMGs in the finishing order in tenth overall lost pace in the closing hour due to a failing air conditioning unit that left driver Kaku Ohta dehydrated by the finish. The factory Honda driver is due to race in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship’s Battle on the Bricks at Indianapolis this weekend for Acura Meyer Shank Racing.
***Ferrari’s fleet of five 296 GT3s all experienced various woes during the race, with the No. 21 Harmony Racing car of Lorenzo Patrese, Dennis Marschall and Dustin Blattner its top finisher in 22nd. That was after the team went multiple laps down at the very first pit stop due to a stuck wheel nut.
***K-tunes Racing’s Ferrari spent one hour 41 minutes on pit road in the closing stages to repair a cracked oil tank, ending up second to last of the classified finishers in 28th. The only car to complete less distance and still be classified was the Maezawa Racing Ferrari, in which Naoki Yokomizo crashed at 130R after spinning on oil.
***Audi’s sole representative in the race, the No. 14 Phantom Global-run Audi Sport Asia car that had started third on the grid, was not classified, having only completed 113 laps, six shy of the minimum 119 (70 percent of the winner) to be classified. It followed a near-two hour spell in the pits after an early pit road fire, caused by a suspected oil leak.
***Audi Sport Asia’s head of customer racing Alexander Blackie commented: “We assembled three of China’s leading GT3 drivers to line up against the world’s best at the Suzuka 1000 because we knew they could compete with anyone. [Franky] Cheng Congfu, Yu Kuai and Deng Yi proved this during qualifying, placing third out of 33 with the Audi R8 LMS. In the race, they did not have luck on their side and lost out through no fault of their own, but that’s motor racing.”
***There were a total of ten former Porsche Carrera Cup/Supercup champions on the grid in Sunday’s race, spanning the manufacturer’s single-make series in Germany, France, Great Britain, Asia and North America, as well as the Mobil 1 Supercup. Of note, 2024 Carrera Cup North America champion Loek Hartog, who is now a Porsche Motorsport North America Selected Driver, took Bronze Cup honors in the No. 10 Absolute Racing Porsche together with Richard Lietz and Antares Au.
***As well as for the overall top three and the four sub-classes (Bronze, Silver, Pro-Am and Am), additional podium ceremonies were held for the best GT World Challenge Asia powered by AWS regulars, and the top Japan Cup teams.
***Team KRC topped the GTWC Asia ranking in ninth overall, with eligibility based on the car’s lineup featuring the same Bronze-rated driver (in this case Ruan Cunfan) as the full-season entry. Porsche Center Okazaki’s No. 18 car (14th overall) and the No. 86 Origine Porsche (19th) were second and third. Nissan squad Runup Sports doubled up by winning the Japan Cup classification as well as the two-car Am contest.
***Both the Team 5ZIGEN Nissan GT-R NISMO GT3 and Goodsmile Racing Mercedes-AMG survived a late collision, as Kamui Kobayashi rear-ended Yu Kanamaru, to finish 15th and 16th respectively. It put the teams second and third in the unofficial ‘Japanese team’s classification behind the Porsche Center Okazaki car.
***Toyota-contracted Kazuto Kotaka expressed his delight at helping the ARN Racing-run No. 18 Porsche finish as top Japanese car, having recovered from the undisclosed injury that prevented him from racing at the Nürburgring round of the GT World Challenge Europe powered by AWS Endurance Cup. “It wasn’t necessarily our target, but those teams [5ZIGEN and Goodsmile] has drivers that everyone knows, so we didn’t want to lose to them. [Hiroaki] Nagai-san did a great job and I’m really glad we beat them.”
***Team Handwork Challenge’s Nissan failed to finish after suffering a sudden engine failure while SUPER GT racer Atsushi Miyake was at the wheel.
***Bingo Racing owner/driver Shinji Takei revealed to Sportscar365 that the team’s Callaway Corvette C7-R has at least one more race ahead of it, as it is set to race in Super Taikyu before the end of the year. Beyond that, the car’s homologation is valid for one more year, meaning it could make its final farewell in next year’s Suzuka 1000km.
***A stuck brake pedal was revealed by the team as the cause for the car’s failure to finish. Ukyo Sasahara had been running inside the top ten for the opening part of the race before coming to the pits to hand over to Bronze-rated Takei.
***The DNF capped off a bad day for Bingo, which had seen its title hopes in Japan Cup go up in smoke in Sunday morning’s second race of the weekend as Takei’s Ferrari 296 GT3 was rear-ended by the Seven x Seven Racing Porsche 911 GT3 R of ‘Bankcy’ at the hairpin. That opened the door for Team Hitotsuyama Ferrari pair Akihiro Tsuzuki and Shintaro Kawabata to steal the title. The race was won by PONOS Ferrari duo Kei Cozzolino and Yorikatsu Tsujiko. Full results can be viewed here.
***Suzuka announced a two-day attendance of 24,000 fans, of which 15,000 were present on race day. That compares to 51,000 in 2019 and 53,000 in 2018 for the two runnings of the Suzuka 10 Hours, albeit with attendance measured over three days.
John Dagys contributed to this report
Source: Sports Car 365