The Final Battle: Breaking down Super GT’s title contenders

The 2015 Autobacs Super GT Series season will come to a close on Sunday (or late, late Saturday evening) – and yet again, we’re going to have a thrilling race for the GT500 crown with six teams and their twelve drivers still mathematically eligible for the championship going into this final 250 kilometer race at Twin Ring Motegi.

The GT300 title has already been decided in favor of International veteran racer Andre Couto, who won the Drivers’ Championship for GAINER at Autopolis. It was an emotional scene after the race, after Couto, a veteran of eleven seasons in GT500 and now two seasons in GT300 competition, dedicated the championship to his team, who won a Drivers’ Championship for the first time in over a decade of racing, his 2015 co-drivers Katsumasa Chiyo (who really should be considered for Driver of the Year honors in any credible sports car racing publication) and Ryuichiro Tomita (who will almost surely be in the frame for a full-time GT300 drive next year), and then to his late son Afonso, who died of childhood leukemia in November of 2010 at the age of seven.

Couto and Chiyo won’t have to push too hard when they race at Motegi with the championships already decided, however, if they drive the Tanax GT-R to a podium finish, Couto will be the first GT300 driver to amass 100 points in a season since Keiichi Suzuki and the late Shingo Tachi in their historic 1998 season, where they won an astonishing five of six races driving a Toyota MR2 jointly fielded by Team Taisan and Tsuchiya Engineering (now Team Samurai).

The GT500 championship, however, is far from decided, with six teams still mathematically eligible as the above table demonstrates. Realistically, it will likely be a two-horse race between the Calsonic Nissan GT-R of IMPUL and the Motul Nissan GT-R of defending champions NISMO, with three of the other four teams absolutely needing to win to have any chance of winning the championship. But as last year proved, an early mishap can potentially blow the whole thing wide open. So what’s at stake for the championship contenders in Motegi?

Super GT Title Fights: GT500

The Autobacs Super GT Series returns to action on October 5th at the Chang International Circuit in Buriram, Thailand for the inaugural running of the Buriram United Super GT Race. Thailand succeeds Malaysia and the Sepang Circuit as the series’ lone fly-away event in the championship, after nearly fifteen years of Super GT cars racing at Sepang. This race, and then the final round of the championship at Twin Ring Motegi in November, will decide who comes away with the GT500 championship in 2014.

To make things more interesting, the weight handicaps that have been accumulated by all the teams over the first six races have now been reset to one kilogram per point scored. By letter of the law, teams are allowed a maximum of 50kg of physical lead ballast, with any additional success ballast added on as fuel flow restrictions. Those fuel flow restrictions create interesting strategic battles for endurance races like the one at the Suzuka 1000km this August, but with the remaining two events being 300km and 250km respectively, it was a good move for the series’ sanctioning body, the GTA, to “trim the fat” in a manner of speaking. It’s a much more extreme version of the Balance of Performance system from the World Endurance Championship and United SportsCar Championship, or the ballast systems used in the British Touring Car Championship and the DTM.

At least seven teams and driver combinations representing all three manufacturers in GT500 – Lexus, Nissan, and Honda – have a mathematical chance at winning the title with two races to go and a maximum of forty (40) points available. Let’s take a look at what’s at stake for these teams and their drivers.

NISMO are the most successful team in the history of Super GT, having won the top class championship a record six times since 1993, and being a strong contender for the championship virtually every year they compete as the factory team in the Nissan stable. But after losing out on the 2011 championship despite claiming a series-leading three race victories with Satoshi Motoyama and Benoit Treluyer, NISMO went on a two-year winless drought that was finally snapped at the third round in Autopolis. To draw a comparison, this is like if Team Penske suffered a two-year winless streak in IndyCar. Even in the ultra-competitive GT500 class, this was a completely uncharacteristic run of futility for a successful and internationally-recognized organization. Now, after breaking their 18-race winless streak in June, and on the back of two consecutive 2nd-place finishes at Fuji II and Suzuka, NISMO drivers Tsugio Matsuda and Ronnie Quintarelli hold a four-point lead in the standings with a total of 60 points.