Finally getting around to blogging about the first round of the Autobacs Super GT first round held at Okayama during a very wet March weekend. Honestly this is my first time blogging about a race so I'm sitting here looking at my notes wondering what the hell I'm doing. Yes I wrote notes during the race so that I could remember what the hell was going on besides cars going zoom zoom around a track. I guess the best way to go is to split the race into it's two groups the GT500 group and the GT300 group as as much as everyone is going gaga over the new Nissan GT-R I find that the GT300 group is more interesting to watch and during this opening race that was very much the case.
The GT500 race was fairly boring since the contention for 1st place was made during the first lap of racing as the HIS Nissan GT-R staid in 1st place the entire race leaving the battling to 2-3 place and even that wasn't nearly as interesting as what was happening back in GT300 group. The one non-Japanese entrance in the GT500 group was an FIAGT (I think) Aston Martin DBR9 that had a hard time not getting lapped by everyone. A little looking around it might be the fault of a poor setup and limits that are set for that series of cars.
Now the GT300 group was a lot more interesting to watch as there were countless battles for different places and the entire field of cars is made of different cars so there is something for everyone to like. I didn't see any 350Z cars though and there was even a lot less Porsche 911 cars as well. What I did like to see again was the Studio GLAD Racing BMW Z4GTR from last year making a come back and even though it only finished in 15th place at least this year it finished a race. I'm going to be looking forward to seeing it race more throughout the year. There are also a handful of Ferrari and Lamborghini fielded cars as well. There are even a couple of purebred race cars (I can't think of what to actually call them but they look like older LeMans and Can-am prototype cars). The GT300 race was won by the Lexus IS350 but more impressive was Autobacs odd duck race car that ended up battling back from 7th place to take 2nd. Impressive.
Since this was a very wet race it wasn't unusual to see a few cars over cooking corners and ending up off course or even sometimes getting into a bit of a bang up with other cars. And even though I'm a big fan of the smash ups Super GT wrecks don't look all that spectacular and pretty boring. Guess I'll just get my smash up fix from lame ass Nascar. All in all it was a great race even if I was getting bored around the 2hr mark when things started getting repetitive and boring until the Autobacs/Arta race car started making it's move up the field. Now at least I can watch the second race and get to blogging about that. Now I just need to find a good source of Super GT race car pictures. So far one of the better places that I've found is this guys collection on flickr and I hope he doesn't mind me borrowing his image for my blog post. I tried last year to get a media pass for SuperGT.net but they never got back to me about any of it so didn't try to apply this year as well.
