A week before Super Formula opened their 2023 campaign at Fuji Speedway, the Formula Regional Japanese Championship opened their fourth season at the speedway as part of a festival of clubman races.
But the grid for the opening race was thin, at just nine cars including four Master Class entries fielded for gentleman drivers.
Happy holidays from Super GT World! While you’re enjoying time with family and friends, we’ve put together another Super GT Stove League update, aggregated from the pages of the latest issue of auto sport Magazine, Volume N° 1522, published digitally this week.
Naturally, this is a followup to the previous update – and gives us a clearer picture of what to expect as Toyota, Honda, and Nissan prepare to unveil their roster of GT500 teams and drivers in advance of the 2020 season, the first under the true Class 1 regulations.
As a standard disclaimer, it should be stated up front that all information contained in this post – while compiled from reputable sources that have connections with the manufacturers involved – is not confirmed as of yet until they are announced by the manufacturers, teams, and drivers involved.
It’s that time of year again in the Japanese auto racing season. The cars themselves are silent, but the discussion of the 2020 Autobacs Super GT Series to come is anything but. Welcome to another round of the domestic racing Stove League, the “Silly Season” by another name, the winter period where the pieces of the puzzle that is the 2020 Super GT field start to take shape.
Baseball’s own Stove League is already at full burn, where teams negotiate trades and attempt to sign high-dollar free agents. After battling for Major League Baseball’s World Series, ace pitcher Stephen Strasburg just signed a record-breaking deal to remain with the championship-winning Washington Nationals. Days later, his rival from the Houston Astros, Gerrit Cole, eclipsed Strasbourg’s deal with his own record-setting contract upon joining the New York Yankees.
In Super GT, the money is never a talking point, rather the arrangement of the teams and drivers representing the big three manufacturers in GT500: Toyota, Honda, and Nissan. Drivers changing teams, young drivers stepping up from GT300 or stepping in from elsewhere, and old veterans fighting to keep their places in the most competitive class in sports car racing.
Using the information from the latest issue of auto sport Magazine (Volume 1521: “Solving the Mystery of 51 Seats”), as well as the reporting from Motorsport.com contributors such as Jamie Klein, here is Super GT World’s guide to how the GT500 field might look in 2020 – and it starts with the biggest story of the off-season to date.
Yesterday we reported that the Motorsport Network, via their Motorsport TV service, were in line to become the new official international broadcast partner of the Autobacs Super GT Series starting this Saturday with the Fuji GT 500km Race.
We are pleased to learn that Motorsport TV will provide live coverage of the Fuji 500km and the remainder of the 2019 Super GT season, free to all, starting this weekend – instead of placing the series behind Motorsport TV’s premium paywall.
This comes after a statement from Grand Central Entertainment, the producers of the Let’s Go Racing YouTube channel (formerly NISMO TV), stating that they had an unnamed company – which we now know is Motorsport Network – had aggressively bid for exclusive coverage on their platform while Grand Central had a deal in place with Haro Sports & Entertainment, the English-language broadcast distributors for Super GT.
DailySportsCar editor-in-chief Graham Goodwin reported shortly after that it was Motorsport Network who were the unnamed company mentioned by Grand Central/Let’s Go Racing, and it was believed that the series would be made available only to premium Motorsport TV subscribers at a monthly or annual rate.
But, in what we can assume is a response to intense demand from Super GT’s burgeoning international fanbase, every round of the 2019 season will be made available freely on Motorsport TV – a gesture of good faith that is seen as increasingly rare amidst the various criticisms of their ruthless strategy of acquiring various motorsport media outlets and image archives since 2015.
There will be no coverage of official practice and qualifying sessions for the Fuji 500km, however, just the race itself – it can be safely assumed this will continue throughout 2019.
The broadcast team for the English-language coverage of Super GT on Motorsport TV has not yet been confirmed, other than that Sam Collins and Rob Barff will not be a part of the team.
Super GT World