Shade Racing Switches to RC F GT3 After Troubled Year

Photo: Toyota

Shade Racing has announced it will campaign a Lexus RC F GT3 in SUPER GT next season after a troubled year with its Toyota GR86 GT.

The GT300 team based just outside Fuji Speedway endured a 2025 campaign that yielded no drivers’ points, with a best finish of 16th in the first Fuji sprint race, and no fewer than three non-participations during the year due to various incidents.

Two separate fires that struck the team’s apr-supplied No. 20 GR86 forced it to miss the third round of the season at Sepang as well as the fifth round at Suzuka, while a heavy crash at Sugo also sidelined the Shade Toyota for the following race at Autopolis.

While the car returned for the final round at Motegi, the team has announced it will switch to the venerable RC F GT3 for the 2026 campaign.

Katsuyuki Hiranaka and Eijiro Shimizu remain as drivers, as announced by Toyota last week, while Michelin stays on as tire supplier, guaranteeing the French firm at least one car in the GT300 field for the final year of open tire competition in SUPER GT.

“Last season, we fell victim to many accidents and we faced many extremely difficult races,” commented Hiranaka. “It’s disappointed we didn’t achieve the results we hoped for, but we’ll use this experience to come back even stronger in 2026.

“It won’t be easy competing with a new car, but we will thoroughly prepare as a team and steadily fight one race at a time. We’ll continue to use Michelin tires, and we’ll give our all to earn results from the opening round.”

Shade’s decision to switch to the RC F GT3 mean there are likely to be two examples of the car on the SUPER GT grid next season, with K-tunes Racing also sticking with an unchanged driver lineup of Morio Nitta and Shinichi Takagi.

However, Anest Iwata Racing is understood to have elected to switch to a new car for next season after three seasons of disappointing results using the RC F GT3.

It has been speculated Anest, which entered a tie-up with Gainer last year, could field a second example of the Nissan Z that the Kyoto-based team has run since last year.

Source: Sports Car 365