Super Taikyu Series Round 1

On March 30th (Sun) the opening round of the Super Taikyu Series was held at Twin Ring Motegi (Motegi, Tochigi Prefecture) where the #17 NOPRO DEMIO (Toshihiko Nogami / Tatsuya Tanigawa / Tatsuya Nogami / Hiroaki Yamamoto) took 4th place in the ST5 class.

At the official qualifying session held on a sunny Saturday, while competing with strong rivals which included 3 new Fits whose speed has become a topic of late, Tanigawa, a man with experience behind the wheel of GT500 vehicles, recorded the 4th fastest time in class and showed just how capable he is. There was rain right from the morning of the 30th, the day of the final race. The NOPRO DEMIO started from 6th place on the grid. Tanigawa, as the starting driver, managed to reach 3rd place early on and, after driving for about 2 and a half hours and right before alternating with the second driver, Yamamoto, was running in 2nd place. Unfortunately however, this overlapped with the time in which the rain reached its heaviest point and Yamamoto fell back to 4th place. After this, there was a driver change with Tatsuya Nogami and, at the later stages, a return to Tanigawa in an attempt to recover the lost ground. However, this didn’t prove possible and 5 hours later at 17:22 the car passed the checkered flag in 4th place. Team representative Toshihiko Nogami said, “although everything went according to plan in the first half, unfortunately we just couldn’t manage to recover the losses we made at the midpoint. Although we fully expect a tough fight with the high caliber Fits, with which there was an almost 3 second difference in lap times, its clear that we definitely have a chance if we are capable of achieving our attempts to keep pit loss to a minimum. The season has just begun. Next round we will aim for the podium.”

The #54 TCR Roadster(Teruaki Kato / Tsubasa Kondo) which debuted in this race managed to take 6th place in the ST4 class. The #88 Murakami Motors Roadster (Masanobu Kato/ Takeshi Wakiya / Hiroyuki Murakami) damaged its engine during practice on Thursday and Friday and was unable to take part in the qualifying session. However, after ordering a repair engine from the Yokohama shop, the car was in time for the warm up run on race day and finished 9th in class.

Photo by MZRacing