The inaugural round of the 2015 Super GT season, held at Okayama, saw a Toyota sweep in both classes, as the KeePer TOM’s RC F GT500 was glorified with overall honors, while the apr Prius GT took the GT300 win, with a good start of the JAF-GT hybrid models, as the ARTA CR-Z finished second in the class.
The race
also marked the start of the full season attack for the new Mother Chassis cars, as three teams
entered with the Toyota 86 MC and the
Cars Tokai Dream team entered the Lotus
Evora MC, conceived by Mooncraft, and probably showed that there’s still a
lot to learn to be competitive over the season.
In fact, there was only one team with a Mother Chassis car that remained competitive over the whole weekend, as the VivaC 86 MC car, driven by Takeshi Tsuchiya and Takamitsu Matsui, not only managed to start in fourth place, being just three tenths of a second behind the polesitter GAINER TAMAX GT-R GT3, but the new car was the best placed of the kind, as they finished in sixth after more than two hours of race, in the most different conditions. We can say that Tsuchiya’s one-off experience with the car last year was at least useful this year.
The other
86 MCs stood far away from a good performance on track, both inqualifying and
in the race.
The No. 18 UPGARAGE Bandoh car managed to start 13th, and had a troubled race, as a heavy damage in the back wing and in the diffuser made the team lose time, finishing 19thin the class. Don’t take the team out of the competition, but it will need time for Yuuki Nakayama and Yuji Ide to put their 86 MC in the front pack.
The No. 5 Team Mach car also had a weekend to forget, as the back of the grid was a sad reality to the team, qualifying in 26th out of 29 GT300 entries, and retiring of the race after just one lap.
The No. 2 SYNTIUM Apple Evora MC made a conservative race, but certainly has more potential to be brought later, as it qualified 17th and gained a single position through the whole race, finishing 16th.
The initial
step was given, as the Mother Chassis cars seem to be lapping well in
qualifying, but they obviously need some fine tuning and a good track condition
to perform well in the next races. Some success over the year can trigger interest
of other parties to enter with concepts to the Mother Chassis, and that's what we
all want.
Do you like
the Mother Chassis concept? What’s your opinion about their performances? Be
welcome to leave a comment, and if you missed the race, run to NISMO.TV channel on YouTube and watch
the whole race with the Radio Le Mans
crew commenting from green to checkered.
PHOTOS: apr Racing, VivaC Team Tsuchiya, Team UPGARAGE with Bandoh, Auto Sport-web
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