D'Station Racing see out a difficult Super GT season at Fuji this weekend
Thursday, November 26, 2020
The D’Station Racing team and their title sponsors Pacific had high hopes for the new season having secured the racing services of a one, Nicky Thiim but a lot of those hopes and aspirations quickly faded as it soon became apparent that neither Thiim nor the supporting Prodrive engineers would be able to freely travel in and out of the country as the world slowly worked out how to deal with the virus.
Securing the racing services of a Japan domiciled Italian in Kei Cozzolino at the last minute, the team at least had a co-driver for their home-grown Tomonobu Fujii but having swapped to Michelins for 2020, with no AMR technical support in attendance at the circuit (although the do benefit from their support on-line) and Cozzolino’s initial lack of knowledge of the Aston (being predominantly a Ferrari racer), the team would always be on the back foot.
Despite all of that, the team has at least scored nearly twice the number of Team Championship points than they did last year, first time out with the new Aston Martin Racing V8 Vantage GT3.
Going into this final round of the season, Fujii is again partnered by one of the team’s AMR Vantage GT4 racers from the Super Taikyu Series in Takuro Shinohara who deputised for the Italian whilst he was unavailable to compete having competed at Le Mans for another team.
Sadly for them, there is nothing more to race for than pride but at least the squad have plenty of data from the previous rounds and official tests at the circuit this year for them to arrive at Sunday’s race start in the best position possible.
Photo credits – D’Station Racing / Super GT
