Rain and one key mistake hurts Subaru BRZ GT300 at Sports Land SUGO

The 2014 Subaru BRZ GT300 was the second fastest car at Sports Land SUGO qualifying. Why did they finish 14th?

The 2014 Subaru BRZ GT300 had a great qualifying round in the SUPER GT at Sports Land SUGO and was the second fastest car on the track. The BRZ GT300 team started in second position for the race and things were looking good for this race. The 300km race was the final race of round four and took place on Sunday in Japan at Sports Land SUGO race track. But bad weather plagued the track even in the qualifying but the BRZ GT300 was fast as it has been all season. The team was ready to attack and bring home a victory.

The BRZ is fast on the dry track

Kota Sasaki was the driver responsible for the fast attack in the qualifying rounds and was able to secure a second place start in the race. He was only 0.2 seconds off the pace of the fastest car. But the track was slick as the rain began to fall again at race time and the team prepared the Subaru BRZ with special rain tires right before the race started so it would have the grip needed on the wet track.

The weather was a factor

Right after the race started, the rain stopped and the track dried out enough that the tires did match the track conditions. This caused the BRZ race car problems keeping its fast pace. The BRZ GT300 was brought back into the pits after dropping back to fourth place and the rain tires were replaced with slick tires because they didn’t match track conditions and were putting them farther behind with each lap.

BRZ never recovers

The team thought they would be able to recover with the new tires, but were issued a pit violation and received a penalty which was issued later in the race. The mistake cost them time and the team was never able to recover after the costly mistake.

The car was extremely quick in the dry conditions and things were looking good for the BRZ GT300. But the drivers struggled on the wet track which cost the team to slip back and ultimately needed the extra time in the pits changing tires again. The bad weather played a factor and the team finished the race in 14th place.

Fuji is next

After the race driver Takuto Iguchi said, "It was a difficult race, which is highly dependent on weather. But our lap times were so fast we thought we could finish well with the fast car. We had good results at the Suzuka race and were confident we could achieve similar results here. But we fell back and never were able to recover. We are now looking forward to Fuji.”

Next up for the 2014 Subaru BRZ GT300 race team will be round five at Fuji Speedway in Japan on August 9-10. The R & D Sport team knows they have a fast BRZ race car and can win their GT300 class if they can put it all together.

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