Toyota’s Super GT Champions Trail for the First Time in Three Years

Toyota’s defending Super GT champions will start Sunday’s title decider at Motegi two points behind, the first time in about three years that the au TOM’S team has trailed anyone. Sho Tsuboi and Kenta Yamashita finished tenth on Saturday in the #36 GR Supra, and even that was a gift, since a teammate’s disqualification lifted them from eleventh. They came into the weekend three points clear of the #100 Stanley Honda Prelude and leave the first of the two Motegi races with 62 points to the Honda’s 64.

The day was a rough one for Toyota’s GT500 effort all round. The #14 ENEOS X Prime GR Supra crossed the line second and was thrown out hours later over a worn skid block, a ruling its team says it will appeal, and the best Supra to keep its result was the #39 SARD car in fourth. Nissan took the win, its first of the year, while the Lexus RC F GT3 won the GT300 class for the second race running and Toyota’s new GR GT3 finished its first race a lap down.

The results come from the provisional classification published by Autosport web and from the series’ official notices. The 250-kilometer race, run over 53 laps in sunny, dry conditions with the track at 22 degrees Celsius, was the make-up for the Sepang round postponed earlier in the year, which is why Motegi hosts both Round 3 on Saturday and the Round 8 finale on Sunday. Both title cars ran with a fuel-flow restrictor on Saturday because their success ballast exceeded the 50-kilogram cap at the half-rate weighting used for the seventh race of the season, and both handicaps come off for the finale.

Autosport web counts it as the first time in about three years that au TOM’S has not led the standings. The #36 started seventh and never found pace. Yamashita held station in the opening stint and pitted on lap 19, but when the #100 stopped a lap later it rejoined ahead of Tsuboi, and the Supra then slipped behind the #24 Realize Nissan and the #17 Astemo Honda in the closing laps to finish eleventh on the road, out of the points. Yamashita told Autosport web the tire the team chose warmed up poorly in temperatures cooler than Friday’s, made worse when the sun went behind cloud late in the race, and he called the situation a crisis that would need a different approach on Sunday. Tsuboi said he had sensed since the Fuji round that the Prelude had become extremely strong and that this was, in a sense, exactly as he had predicted, but that Toyota’s answer to the other two manufacturers would only be known on Sunday, when a win is required.

The disqualification is the bigger story for the championship table. Nirei Fukuzumi and Kazuya Oshima started the #14 third and Oshima passed the #8 ARTA Honda for second on lap 49, 20.461 seconds behind the winning #12 Impul Nissan Z of Kazuki Hiramine and Bertrand Baguette. Post-race scrutineering found the skid block under the car thinner than GT500 Technical Regulation 3.22.4A allows, and a revised provisional result issued at 6:50 pm removed the car. At 8:30 pm official notice No. 29 recorded that TGR Team ENEOS Rookie had declared in writing that it intends to appeal the stewards’ ruling, and that the GT500 result is reserved until the appeal is decided. motorsport.com’s Japanese edition notes that second place would have been worth 15 points and kept the #14 in the title picture, and that depending on how the appeal runs, the champion may not be known even after Sunday’s race. The GT300 runner-up, the #26 Anest Iwata Nissan Z, was also excluded, for boost pressure above the permitted limit, and that ruling is final.

Either way, the gap at the top is two points. With the #14 excluded, the #100 of Naoki Yamamoto and Tadasuke Makino is classified fifth for six points and the #36 tenth for one. If the appeal restores the #14, the Honda drops to sixth for five points and the Supra to eleventh for none. Behind them Astemo’s Koudai Tsukakoshi and Yuto Nomura sit on 50, Hiramine and Baguette on 46, the ARTA pair of Kakunoshin Ohta and Hiroki Otsu on 45 and SARD’s Yuhi Sekiguchi and Sacha Fenestraz on 44, which makes six crews mathematically alive for Sunday’s 20-point win. Ties go to the crew with more wins. The SARD Supra took fuel only at its stop on lap 23, lost places to the Impul and the #14 on fresher tires, and held off the #100 at the flag by 0.152 seconds. The #38 KeePer Cerumo Supra was eleventh, the #19 WedsSport Bandoh Supra twelfth, and the #37 Deloitte TOM’S car of Ukyo Sasahara and Giuliano Alesi completed 24 laps and was not classified.

Hiramine’s win, taken with a pass on the pole-sitting #64 Modulo Honda into Turn 1 on lap 39, was Team Impul’s first since Suzuka in 2022 and Nissan’s first GT500 victory of 2026. The Impul had started sixth.

In GT300 the #96 K-tunes Lexus RC F GT3 of Morio Nitta and Shinichi Takagi won for the second race in a row, by 11.698 seconds on the road and 12.393 over the Porsche promoted to second. Sportscar365 counts it as the 23rd class win for Takagi and the 24th for Nitta, who retires after Sunday’s race. The pair are now nine points behind the #56 Kondo Nissan GT-R of Joao Paulo de Oliveira and Iori Kimura, 75 to 66 in the official standings, after the leaders finished 14th with two time penalties and a drive-through. The #20 Shade Racing RC F GT3 was fifth, its best result of the year, while the #31 apr Lexus LC500h was eliminated in a first-lap crash at Turn 3 with the D’station Aston Martin and the CarGuy Ferrari that brought out the safety car.

The GR GT3’s first race ended in 19th place, one lap down, with Hiroaki Ishiura and 19-year-old Tokiya Suzuki in the #32 ENEOS X Prime GR GT3 concept. The car ran as an open entry with no points available, as we reported before the weekend, and it had been last of the 28 GT300 cars in Friday practice, 2.821 seconds off the pace. The official timing tells a better story than the finishing position: the car’s best lap of 1 minute 48.117 seconds was quicker than the best laps of eleven cars that finished ahead of it. Ishiura told Sportscar365 after Friday’s running that a real race weekend had already exposed things a test never would, including the need for a locking mechanism on the pedal box for driver changes, the clutch technique for a grid start with the steering on full lock, and the sightlines through the mirrors when racing alongside other cars. GR GT project manager Takashi Doi told Speedweek the team chose Super GT over next week’s Super Taikyu round at Fuji because it wanted the car among many GT3 cars racing side by side.

The finale, the Motegi GT Grand Final, runs 53 laps on Sunday, November 8, with qualifying at 9:45 am and the start at 2:00 pm Japan time.

The Toyota Report Take

A two-point deficit is not a disaster, and Tsuboi was right that the only plan that ever made sense for a no-ballast finale was to win it. What should worry Toyota is not the number but the trend. Honda’s Prelude has been the quicker car since the summer, Saturday’s tire choice left the Supra with nothing to fight with, and the only other Toyota in the frame has to win on Sunday while its own stewards’ case is still open. A title decided weeks later by an appeal panel would be a sour way to close the GR Supra’s GT500 career, whichever way it falls.

The GR GT3 is the brighter note. Finishing a lap down looks poor until you notice it lapped faster than more than half the cars in front of it while the team was learning where the mirrors point. That is exactly what Toyota said this weekend was for, and it makes the Daytona debut reported for January look less like a gamble.

More on the Supra

• Toyota’s Super GT Reign Ended in the Garage With Eight Laps to Go
• The Same Driver Gave Toyota Its 500th and 700th NASCAR Wins