2016.11.12

Round3 Motegi : Race Press Conference

Round3 Twin Ring Motegi : Race Press Conference

No.24 Forum Engineering ADVAN GT-R

 

From the outset I had in mind the strategy of running the whole race without a tire change. So, I was thinking that I could follow the two lead machines skillfully without pushing too hard, it would make things easier for us in the second half of the race. I tried to save the tires as much as possible, but it still turned out that I left Yanagida-san with a lot of hard work in the final stages of the race. I am happy that we won today, but there is still another qualifying and race waiting for us tomorrow, so I am going to try to clear my mind to be ready for that challenge.

 

I was being chased hard in the late laps of the race and I hear that things were really tense for everyone in our pit, and to tell the truth, I was really tense out their too! We won today but I can’t feel really ecstatic about it yet. I want to save that for when we win tomorrow and everything is over. The biggest reason for today’s win has to be the fact that we got a front-row spot on the grid. What is our strategy for tomorrow? I’ll leave it to you to imagine.

 

 

 

No.21 Hitotsuyama Audi R8 LMS

 

I am grateful to everyone [for this win], of course to my teammate [Tomonobu Fujii] and to the team and WRT (technical support), to Audi Japan and everyone involved with the team. The pre-race warm-up was the first time in the race weekend that we were able to run on dry-use tires, so were really going just with what we had concerning the set-up, but Dunlop has a record of success in the final round at Motegi and I think the good tires they prepared for us this time was the deciding factor in our win today.

 

This is the third year since I came to this team and started driving Audi machines, and until last year, even though we would get and podium finish about once a year, we were still far from winning races. This year, the machine is better and we came close to winning at Fuji in the summer. It was really disappointing to miss winning that race by 1/10th of a second, and there were a number of equally disappointing races after that, but this time we finally won. So, I’m half happy and half simply relieved to get this result. With today’s win we have a chance to go for the title tomorrow, but I am going to go into the race tomorrow with do-or-die determination.

 

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