Subaru has “back against the wall” in GT300 title fight

The brand-new BRZ has endured a rough start to the 2023 season, Takuto Iguchi and Hideki Yamauchi finishing a distant 22nd in a wet and wild opening race at Okayama and then coming home 11th in last week’s Golden Week classic at Fuji.

It marks the first time the R&D Sport-run squad has failed to score points for two races in a row since the introduction of the second-generation BRZ in 2021.

Subaru’s Fuji struggles began with a transmission problem in practice, which the team said was a contributing factor in Iguchi being eliminated in the first segment of qualifying, leaving the works BRZ starting a lowly 19th on the grid.

Yamauchi took the start, vaulting into 11th with a strong opening lap and running as high as fifth as other cars came in to make their first pitstops, but electrical trouble prompted him to pit early on lap 24 to perform a reset.

A recurrence of the issue led Yamauchi to pit again on lap 49 to hand over to Iguchi, who had to battle fuel consumption woes to make the chequered flag.

 

Photo by: Subaru/STI Motorsport

Subaru general manager Masahiro Ozawa reflected: “Yamauchi did a great job raising his position and it looked like we were on for a really good race. 

“But then we had an electronics problem and we had to make an emergency pitstop to reset everything. That also threw off our strategy. I think we had the chance to move forward even more, so it’s a real shame. 

“It’s frustrating that we didn’t get the result we wanted, but I think we saw that we made the step up in performance [from qualifying] we were aiming for.”

Yamauchi said that while he was satisfied to make up places in the early stages, Subaru can’t afford to drop any more points even as the team heads to a venue where it had difficulties last year.

“We struggled a bit last year at Suzuka, but now our back is to the wall, so it’s not time to be worried about that,” he said. “The key will be how far we can recover at Suzuka. We have to score points.

"We’re in a very difficult situation as far as the championship goes, so we absolutely have to demonstrate our potential at Suzuka.”

Iguchi added: “Things haven’t gone well since the opening race, but I think we showed something good with our race performance, so I want to use that as motivation to prepare for the upcoming races.”

Subaru took part in this week’s GTA-organised carbon-neutral fuel test for GT300 cars at Suzuka, setting the quickest time overall over the two days of running of 1m57.556s on Monday.

However, the works BRZ also suffered a technical problem that prevented it from running in the afternoon session that day.