Zak O'Sullivan on maiden Super Formula pole and podium, Super GT campaign and more
- Tarun Suresh
- Jul 31
- 6 min read
Zak O’Sullivan was a junior and reserve driver for the Williams F1 Team and had a successful junior formula career, winning the GB3 Championship in his debut season, finishing second in Formula 3 and grabbing two wins halfway through his debut Formula 2 season. However, he had to halt his F2 campaign mid-season due to a lack of funding.
The next year, he set his eyes on a Super GT/Super Formula dual campaign. After a solid Japanese motorsport debut and barely missing out on the Super GT GT300 title, he was recruited by Kazuki Hoshino, son of the ‘fastest man in Japan,’ Kazuyoshi Hoshino, for the historic, family-run Team Impul.
Hoshino believed the right driver would bring the team back to its glory days and was certain O’Sullivan would be the right choice. Seven rounds into the Super Formula season, it looks like Hoshino’s hopes are coming to fruition as O’Sullivan took pole in a wet qualifying session for Round 6 and finished second, grabbing his first pole and podium and the team’s first since 2023.
O’Sullivan was interviewed by DIVEBOMB following Rounds 3,6 & 7 of this year’s Super Formula calendar.
His most recent pole and podium were his first in a single seater since his F2 days. It was much more important for Team Impul, who despite being the most successful team in Super Formula history with 11 Drivers’ Championships and 8 Teams’ Championships, had their first pointless season last year following a couple of difficult seasons.
“They were very happy and probably more happy than I was, because I was already thinking about the rest of the day and thinking, oh god, we've got a full dry day coming up. But once I saw how pleased they were about it, especially the pole position, I started to understand it.
“Of course, I've come into this team this year, my second year in Japan, and my full focus is just trying to perform and go race by race. There's a bit less of a kind of sentimental value to it. But they're ecstatic, and delivering a podium for them as well after so many years of struggle was fantastic.”
During the race itself, O’Sullivan had created a solid 5 second lead out front by the time he made his pitstop. However, a charging Kakunoshin Ohta had successfully undercut him and went on to win the race, leaving O’Sullivan to settle for second. After a short duel with the championship leader, O’Sullivan exclaimed on the radio, “the [Honda’s] top speed is a f*****g joke”
O’Sullivan explained his frustrations: “I think my words summed up what I felt in the cockpit, that it's not a known issue outside of the paddock, but in the paddock it's been an issue for the last three years or so, even before I was here. I mean, you could probably see that in [Round 7], the top three Hondas are about 15 seconds ahead of the first Toyota.
“It is difficult, and it ends up meaning that we have to make quite heavy setup compromises to try and match the top speed of some of the Honda cars.
“Of course, I've only driven a Toyota engine, so of course, I'm sure there are strengths to the Toyota engine, maybe in the low-speed corners, but when you're at a track like Fuji, you really do see the differences. And of course, both manufacturers are developing the engines as hard as they can, but in the heat of the moment, it can be a bit frustrating.”
The following race was the rescheduled Round 3 sprint race. When the race went green, O’Sullivan climbed up to ninth by turn one, having started thirteenth. However, he got caught up in an incident exiting turn one involving Roman Staněk, Nirei Fukuzumi, Ayumu Iwasa and himself. This incident effectively took him out of contention for any points scoring position, and the Briton finished 16th.
“We had a very good start into T1, and then unfortunately was the wrong side of a nougat sandwich and ended up, yeah, I mean, at the time I was a bit confused how I got hit, because I felt like I left a lot of gap.
“But then when I watched the replay, it was just a bit of a pinball from Staněk into Nirei into Iwasa into me. So honestly, quite unfortunate, because I think going into the corner, I was P9 and overtaking with that group of Staněk and Oyu. So potential was there for some points.”
In the race that afternoon, Round 7, O’Sullivan had a difficult time, starting 17th and finishing 15th.
“Just struggling for pace all around. Seemed like a lot of people were in a similar situation with me in terms of having quite high tyre degradation, and not being able to extend the first stint. Well, not being able to extend with good pace as long as we wanted to. I was able to make a few positions at the end, but not enough. So, a bit of work to do, especially in these kinds of high-degradation circuits.”
After the reconnaissance lap, roughly an hour before the formation lap, O’Sullivan opted for a surprise brake change. He reveals why he chose to do so:
“I've been struggling with the brakes all weekend. Even yesterday in the race, I was not happy with the feeling I had from the brakes. We use carbon brakes, so they're quite temperature sensitive and temperamental.
“We'd made changes to the setup of the brakes through the weekend, and I did the reconnaissance lap before the race. I still had a similar feeling. We said, let's just take the risk and change the front brakes to try and see if it fixed the issue. It did feel a lot better in the race, so glad that we made the decision.”
The following Super Formula round will be held at SUGO, the circuit where he scored his best finish last year, crossing the line seventh in the wet weather thriller. O’Sullivan laid down his expectations for the upcoming round:
“I mean, it's a track I really enjoyed last year, and I had my best result. It's a very old-school track. The weekend dynamic changes a lot. Fuji is where we've all done the most laps. It's one of the easier tracks in the calendar to be on the pace, whereas Sugo is one free practice and then straight into qualifying, which I quite like.
“ It's hard to predict where we're going to be. It seems like every race the pecking order is, especially in midfield, changing quite a lot, but I'm looking forward to it. I think qualifying is probably where the race was decided. We didn't really see a lot of scuffling around the pack with the strategies and all that.”
O’Sullivan then went on to further explain his statement about qualifying deciding the race: “Kakunoshin [Ohta] seems to start anywhere and win. But for the rest of us, it's very tough to overtake unless there's a strategy offset like there was earlier in the year in Motegi, for example. But it's very difficult to overtake. And without having extraordinary pace or a tyre offset, it's very tough. So Sugo is going to be all about qualifying.”
While O’Sullivan’s Super Formula results have seen a considerable improvement from last year, the same cannot be said about his results in Super GT, where he competes in GT300 for CarGuy MKS, the newest team on the field. He and his former teammate, Toyota’s rising star Rikuto Kobayashi, won a race and finished just 2.5 points shy of the championship last season.
This season, however, he and his current teammate Reimei Ito have only scored eight points and are thirteenth in the standings, something which O’Sullivan attributes to harsh Balance of Performance (BOP), which is not uncommon amongst those teams that place highly in the GT300 standings, most notably with 2024 champions JLOC only finishing 12th the following year.
“Last year I had a very good year in Super GT, but it's completely BOP-dependent, unfortunately, like any GT3 series. So we've had very, very harsh BOP so far this year. We've been probably one of the slowest cars on track. So I'm hoping they feel sorry for us and give us a bit more power.”
One big change within the CarGuy MKS team is the departure of Rikuto Kobayashi, who has gone on to become a part of Toyota's GT500 roster. The team have brought in 2024 Porsche Carrera Cup Champion Reimei Ito to fill the vacancy. O'Sullivan talks about his relationship with Ito and how the team has been easy to adapt to thanks to their international experience.
"[Kobayashi and I] didn't really communicate. But he was fast, I was fast. So it worked quite well. It's a similar situation with Reimi, to be honest. He doesn't speak much English, and my Japanese has improved slightly. So we're on a similar level.
But it's good. The team, although they're a Japanese team, they have a lot of international experience racing in Europe with Kessel. So there's a lot of processes and practices that are European and that I understand"
O’Sullivan will be racing this weekend in Super GT at the Fuji Speedway and the following weekend in Super Formula at SUGO.
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