Ferrari had a really rewarding weekend in the GT World Challenge Asia powered by AWS, with Ferrari cars a podium fixture on the technical Japanese track. There were three 488 GT3 Evo 2020s lined up for the seventh and eighth round of the SRO championship’s Asian series, with Kimura and Cozzolino firmly in contention for the title.
Race-1. Kiyoto Fujinami and Naoki Yokomizo achieved great success after a hard-fought all-Ferrari duel, winning out for Yogibo Racing ahead of the CarGuy Racing pairing of Takeshi Kimura and Kei Cozzolino. After making a fantastic start, Yokomizo defended his position up until the time came for the pit stop. The extra-5-second Success Penalty for CarGuy’s stop helped Fujinami to handle the leading position more calmly, before tirelessly defending against the repeated assaults of an aggressive Cozzolino. In the end, Yogibo’s former Super GT300 champion pipped CarGuy’s rider to the post by just 4 tenths of a second. LMCorsa’s pairing of Kei Nakanishi and Shigekazu Wakisaka took tenth position.
Race-2. CarGuy’s third place in the concluding second round at the Sugo circuit came with a side helping of regret. Following a lightning start from Cozzolino, able to gain more than 20 seconds on his rivals, and penalty of ten made up during the mandatory pit stop after the Race-1 result, Kimura seemed to be on course for an easy win, but a considerable slowdown in the last metres thanks to a tyre problem and error of judgement relating to the finish line took him to a third-place finish instead. The LMCorsa crew with Nakaniski and Wakisaka took ninth place, just 297 thousandths of a second behind Comet Racing’s Honda in eighth. Race-1 winners Fujinami-Yokomizo took fifteenth.
Credits: GT World Challenge Asia