Japanese
“TOKYO AUTO SALON with NAPAC” opened its curtain on January 9th at Makuhari Messe (Chiba Prefecture). TOKYO AUTO SALON is also a tradition to the motorsports world held at the beginning of every year, but the popularity of the event is still on the rise that this year’s event saw an expansion of exhibition area. In addition to domestic automakers, such as Lexus, Nissan, Honda, and Subaru, the importers of foreign cars competing in the SUPER GT, namely Mercedes Benz, BMW, Audi, and newly joining Lotus, are seemingly more motivated than ever, displaying their SUPER GT racing cars at respective places. GT drivers are also making appearance at the booths of respective makers, supporting parts makers, or shops.
EVORA for GT300 unveiled at the Lotus booth.
New machine built on the GT300 mother chassis.
New EVORA built for GT300 class made its first appearance to the public at 10:30AM at Lotus booth. It is the second model built based on the mother chassis (MC) implemented by GTA after TOYOTA 86, which debut at the Round 7 of last season in Thailand, and had just completed assembly.
Takuya Yura, the president and CEO of Mooncraft, the builder of the car, commented with a smile, “I enjoyed building a car for the first time since a long while. I want to do a shakedown before the official test (in Okayama) if it’s possible.... Racing car is useless until it actually runs. But I had many customers coming up to me and say “It’s cool’, so at this point I am satisfied.” Although the mother chassis is used just like in TOYOTA 86, the car is a MR (mid-engine, rear-wheel-drive) package with a GTA engine mounted behind the cockpit. Yura showed a bitter smile as he said, “I now deeply understand the difficulty Honda said it experienced when they built NSX.” But he implied the maturity of the car in his comment, “Since a carbon cowling is fully attached on the chassis, the stiffness of chassis should be much higher than 86.”
SUBARU announces its motorsports activities plan for 2015.
Iguchi/Yamauchi duo in the driver lineup, tires to be supplied by Dunlop.
2015 SUBARU motorsports activities plan announcement was held at the booth of Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd. (SUBARU)/Subaru Tecnica International Inc. (STI) at 10:30AM. As in last year, the SUBARU BRZ GT300 will continue to be fielded in SUPER GT. The team has offered a seat to Hideki Yamauchi to be the partner of Takuto Iguchi this year. In fact, the team package as a whole underwent a significant change with the tire supplier has also been changed to Dunlop.
Team Manager Eiji Tatsumi who takes the helm of the team said, “We invited in Yamauchi who was always annoying us by running in front of us last year (laugh). Improvements that youngsters including Iguchi can make, my expectation is in that possibility. We will put all our effort to be on top not only this year, but also 5 years later.” Tatsumi expressed his strong commitment.
Iguchi, who was promoted to ace driver, said, “Instead of saying which one is the ace, we both are the ace. That is how I want the team to become.”
On the other side, Yamauchi commented, “It will be the first time for me to drive the car, but I used Dunlop last year, so it will be good if we can take advantage of my experience.” It already sounded like a perfect combination. The venue turned out to be a full of expectations that the statement overconfidently made by Team Manager Tatsumi, “3 wins and champion,” may not be a fantasy.
SUPER GT Cars in TOKYO AUTO SALON
| 4/13-14 | Round1 OKAYAMA | |
| 5/03-04 | Round2 FUJI | |
| 6/01-02 | Round3 SUZUKA | |
| 8/03-04 | Round4 FUJI | |
| 9/21-22 | Round6 SUGO | |
| 10/19-20 | Round7 AUTOPOLIS | |
| 11/02-03 | Round8 MOTEGI | |
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12/07-08 | Round5 SUZUKA |