Super Formula round eight recap: Iwasa finally clinches maiden win
- Tarun Suresh
- 18 hours ago
- 4 min read
Written by Tarun Suresh
Qualifying
With rain being forecast for Sunday, Qualifying at SUGO would be absolutely pivotal for the championship fight. Qualifying mixed up the field dramatically.
Fastest driver in Free Practice 1, Syun Koide, made an error which resulted in a wheel hub failure, forcing him to stop on track. Second in the standings, Kakunoshin Ohta didn’t have the pace to make it past Qualifying One and started sixteenth.
Third in Qualifying One B, Toshiki Oyu, crashed out of Qualifying Two after a botched attempt at taking the final corner flat out. Tomoki Nojiri, the driver with the most pole positions, qualified only eleventh.
Third in the standings, Tadasuke Makino qualified only seventh and championship leader Sho Tsuboi qualified fourth.
Sena Sakaguchi had a brilliant qualifying to qualify third, his best of the season. Fenestraz qualified second, the best qualifying finish for the number 37 Team TOM’S car since 2022.
Iwasa, in a race where he needed to finish ahead of the top three in the championship to reasonably stay in the fight for the title, qualified on pole.
Race
The race started under safety car due to the rain that preceded the race. The safety car pulled into the pits at the end of lap five.
After the restart, the top two remained the same. Sho Tsuboi pulled off a stunning overtake on the outside of turn one on Sakaguchi for third.
The conditions proved to be tricky as Oyu and Rasmussen spun to the back of the field on separate occasions.
The Safety car was brought out after Ren Sato spun out on the entry to turn two on lap 10. Sato managed to get the car going and rejoined the race a lap down two laps later.
The safety car was brought in at the end of lap fifteen. Sato retired from the race after the restart.
Juju Noda stopped temporarily after a spin trying to overtake Mitsunori Takaboshi, but was able to get the car going half a lap later.
Kazuya Oshima and Atsushi Miyake tangled on lap 21, damaging the front wing of the latter. Miyake consequently crashed out on the final corner, which deployed yet another safety car.
The two TGMGP’s, Koide and Noda, gambled and came in to pit in the safety car period. Kamui Kobayashi came in a few laps later on lap 26, and in classic Kobayashi fashion, put on some slicks.
The safety car was brought in at the end of lap 28. Kobayashi’s gamble didn’t pay off, and he was losing more than two seconds a sector. Ohta made up two places to ninth.
After a long battle, Fukuzumi pulled off a stunning overtake on lap 47 to get past Tsuboi for fourth.
After waiting for more than a season and a half, coming close time and time again, fighting through reliability issues and poor strategy calls all season, Ayumu Iwasa finally crosses the finish line with no other car in front. Iwasa grabbed a well-deserved win, continuing his streak of finishing on the podium every race he finished this season, and he did so in the trickiest race of the season.
Fenestraz finished second to grab the first podium in four years for the number 37 car. Fukuzumi crossed the finish line third, bagging his first podium finish of the season.
The reigning champion Sho Tsuboi finished fourth, holding off Sakaguchi in fifth. A few seconds behind them was Igor Omura Fraga in sixth. Formula 2 graduate Zak O’Sullivan finished seventh for his best finish of the season.
The driver with the most wins this year, Kakunoshin Ohta, had a weekend to forget and crossed the line in eighth. Kenta Yamashita was on his tail and finished ninth. Makino rounded off the top ten.
Tsuboi still leads the championship, now with 95 points, extending his lead to five points from second place. Iwasa’s race win sees him back in the title fight, as he has now climbed up two places to second. Ohta is third with 87 points, and Makino drops down to fourth with just 74 points.
On the Teams’ side of the championship, things are starting to heat up, too. A poor race from the Team Dandelion resulted in the Kyoto-based outfit’s lead shrinking to just 21 points. Team Dandelion has 149 points ahead of Team Mugen, which has 128 points. Team TOM’S is not far behind with 122 points to their name.
With the remaining four rounds being held at Fuji and Suzuka, circuits where the title contenders have proven themselves to be formidable, the title fight is all but certainly going to go down to the wire.
The next race weekend will be a double header at Fuji, to be held on the tenth of October.
