Nissan Driver Development Program (NDDP) top prospect and Super GT driver Mitsunori Takaboshi was crowned the 2017 All-Japan Formula Three Champion at this weekend’s final race meeting at Sportsland SUGO, taking the title by a final margin of eight points over Toyota Young Driver Program (TDP) top star Sho Tsuboi at the end of a grueling twenty-race season.
Tsuboi won Saturday’s penultimate round of the championship, but with a fourth place finish in that same race, Takaboshi clinched the title with one round in hand, becoming the first driver to win the National Class championship and the main game championship since the former was introduced in 2008.
In the final race of the season, Hiroki Otsu took his first career Japanese F3 victory for TODA Racing, after taking a surprise double pole position on Saturday.
A wet qualifying session saw Otsu sweep pole position for both races, taking two more crucial championship points off the table for Tsuboi, who entered the weekend trailing Takaboshi by 19 points.
With the title contenders on the second row of the grid, TOM’s driver Tsuboi needed to win out for the weekend in order to have any shot at taking the title over B-Max Racing’s Takaboshi.
On a dry track later that afternoon, Otsu led more than half of the 18-lap race on Saturday from pole position, but his hopes were dashed on lap 11 when he crashed at the SP corners, bringing out a safety car late in the race.
The race restarted with four laps to go, and Tsuboi bolted out of the gate, needing the bonus point for fastest lap of the race to extend the championship fight to Sunday’s season finale with Takaboshi now up to fourth place. Tsuboi posted a 1:13.273 on the penultimate lap, and drove on to take the win of the race – his ninth win of the season – ahead of his Corolla Chukyo TOM’s teammate Ritomo Miyata in second, and HFDP Racing’s Sena Sakaguchi scoring his first podium of the year in third.
But on the final lap, Miyata took the fastest lap away from his teammate, posting a 1:13.180. That change in the fastest lap would be enough for Takaboshi’s fourth place finish to seal the championship.
Takaboshi, the protege of four-time Japanese Top Formula champion and three-time GT500 Drivers’ Champion Satoshi Motoyama, previously won the 2013 National Class championship. He becomes the first driver since the two-class structure was introduced to win both Japanese F3 titles in their career. Takaboshi is also the first B-Max Racing driver to win the main title since Yuhi Sekiguchi in 2011.
It’s also the first time that Volkswagen have won the Japanese F3 championship as an engine supplier since they powered Koji Sato to the 1985 championship.
Spaniard Álex Palou (ThreeBond with Drago Corse) and outgoing National Class champion Yoshiaki Katayama (Okayama Kokusai Circuit RC) rounded out the points-scorers in fifth and sixth respectively.
With the drivers’ championships decided before Sunday’s 25-lap season finale, Otsu atoned for his disappointment on Saturday by leading from lights-to-flag and scoring his first career All-Japan F3 victory in a race that also included a late safety car intervention.
Tsuboi finished out the season with a second-place finish, and Miyata edged out Takaboshi for the final podium place by 0.059 seconds in the last race of the season. Sakaguchi ran off course with three laps to go while running fifth, promoting Palou up into fifth, and leading woman Ai Miura (Exedy B-Max Racing) into the final points-paying position in sixth.
Corolla Chukyo Team TOM’s took the Teams’ Championship by eight points over B-Max Racing with NDDP. Palou finished third in the standings as the best rookie, 23 points of Miyata, the highest-ranked “true rookie” – with no prior experience in Formula 3 or higher-rated formulae before the start of 2017.
In the National Class, Ryoya Hasegawa (Albirex Racing Team) and Alex Yang (Hua Jiang Hu Racing) scored the victories on Saturday and Sunday respectively, with Yang taking the win on Sunday after a post-race penalty issued to Katsuaki Kubota for spinning under the safety car.
Mitsunori Takaboshi will now look to finish out his Super GT Series campaign with NDDP Racing on a high over the final two rounds of the season, beginning with the Chang Super GT Race in Buriram, Thailand on October 8. His chances for a GT500 promotion look very good indeed, with seven previous All-Japan F3 champions and four previous National Class champions already competing full time in Super GT’s premier category.
Super GT World 