We went into the weekend determined to win here, as we did not win Suzuka last year. We qualified first and second as we had hoped, but we couldn’t maintain our advantage. Nonetheless, the #1 car managed to finish fourth despite a heavy ballast, leading the championship as we enter the second half of the season. The #17 car has continued to add championship points, and is now ranked fifth (effectively fourth). On the other hand, #64 qualified well but retired due to brake failure, the #8 car didn’t have the pace despite a light handicap, and #16 lost pace late in the race. These are issues we need to get to the bottom of. The next round is Sportsland SUGO, which wasn’t held last year, making it the first time for us to race the FR-layout NSX-GTs at the track. We’ll do our best to prepare for the race.

On Saturday morning, the car’s balance wasn’t what we expected it to be, so we spent a lot of time making adjustments, and only qualified 11th. We went on to set up the car for the race, which paid dividends. Since the weather was unpredictable, we felt it was risky to start the race on hard tires, and although we knew they were the obvious choice, I insisted we used the soft tires for both Qualifying and the race. I’m sorry that it caused a lot of problems for Makino in the first half of the race, but his feedback removed any doubts we had with the hard compound tires, which gave us the pace in the second half. We weren’t on the podium, but we scored championship points, which is important.

We had a hard start to the weekend due to the fuel restrictor capping our top speed on the straights, but we proceeded to set up the car as best as possible. We were expecting more rain, so on that basis we chose tires for Q1. That didn’t go well, so we were 11th on the starting grid. We continued to work on the setup, but the tire selection was fixed at that point, so we had to go with the less optimum choice, making it a hard first half of the race. I gave Yamamoto as much information as I could, and raced while keeping a check on fuel consumption. He managed to gain pace, and finish fourth. It was a good result considering the championship. We’re going to have even heavier ballasts in the following races, so we’ll keep on doing our best.