Now that was some racing! Was able to watch the second round of the Autobacs Super GT series held this time at Suzuka Circuit on Monday (while the third round was going on in Japan) and with the sun out and the track in great shape for racing we finally got some good racing action going on. However, what we didn't get is another race with the StudieGLAD Racing BMW Z4. Moving along though lets get back to the cars that did show up to race.
The GT500 race was finally a well fought race from start to finish. Well Ok there was some parts in the middle that was really boring but the beginning was a hard fought battle between the Motul GTR and a pair of hungry Lexus SC430s that were looking to take the lead away from the GTRs and while there was a bit of traffic helping the lead GTR get away from the SC430s for a while anyways. Even after getting passed by the Impul GTR the Zent Lexus SC430 was able to fight back from 7th place all the way up to 1st place with a huge battle between 1-3 during that last 10 laps or so of the race. First it started with Petronas and Zent jumping down MOtul's back side almost sending Zent off course. Petronas was able to pass the Motul GTR and Zent was able to follow behind quickly leaving Motul in third wondering what happened. Then Zent went after Petronas with aggressive driving side by side getting a little bump action going but not giving up any space until Petronas backed off a bit and Zent was able to surge ahead and take 1st place. All within the last five laps left to go. Sadly Petronas nor Motul were able to fight back due to a full course yellow which would end the racing for the day.
On the GT300 side there was even more battles going on. Not so much for 1st place mind you as that was won by the Hankook Porsche 911 that started on Pole and pretty much staid there the entire race with out much of a threat from anyone else. The major player during the GT300 was the Privee Apple Shiden car that didn't even make it to the starting line but was able to fight back to an astounding finish in that it was able to finish in 7th. Of course the Lamborghinis are still having issues and yet again there was another Lamborghini on the side of the track after breaking down but it looked like the cars having the biggest issue this race were the two Lexus IS350s since both spent some time spinning off course and one could say that the Reckless IS350 was just a bit too reckless during this race. Still with the wreck in the last few laps the racing was called short due to the full course yellow.
To me it's interesting that there is so few multicar wrecks during the Super GT races considering how much traffic there is and how many twists and turns there are to navigate around. However that wasn't the case during the last few laps of this race as a handful of cars got into a banger of a mess. Since they didn't show a replay of the accident I can only speculate as to what happened during the wreck that involved the Autobacs Arta NSX, the Bomex 320R, the HASEMI GTR and I believe the Raybrig NSX the wreck was so bad that it send the driver of the Masemi GTR off in an ambulance. Since this was a pretty serious wreck it caused a full course caution and brought out the pace car. The race ended up being called under the full course yellow so the last couple of laps were rather boring and uneventful. You can find the official results of the race here.
With the second race in the bag for me I get to look forward to the release of the third race and hopefully I'll get to it before the next scheduled race in June. Once again I'm using an image taken by this guy and if you take a look at his sets you'll find a whole host of new images as well.
