When a win was not a win for the D'Station Racing team in GTWC Asia

Monday, June 19, 2023

Another frantically busy weekend of motor racing around the world saw some equally dramatic conclusions to the second round of the GT World Challenge Asia Series from the Fuji Speedway in Japan for the locally based D’Station Racing Aston Martin Racing powered team of Satoshi Hoshino and Tomonobu Fujii.

“Fresh” off the back of a 10-day World Endurance Championship campaign at the centenary edition of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the #47 AMR Vantage GT3 team returned to the Asian based series for what was also the opening round of the Japan Cup.

Created by the Series last season to bolster grid numbers whilst reducing travel commitments for the then COVID travel restricted country, the Japan Cup has returned this year doing likewise again with grid numbers in both GT3 and GT4 format.

Running the usual dual qualifying format per hour long race, Hoshino would start from P6 overall for Saturday’s opening encounter whilst Fujii would start P12 in Sundays race – both races would however be effected with the intervention of Race Control for miniscule breaches that would each cost the team everything.

The first was in Saturday’s opening encounter and having completed their required pitstop to emerge still within a podium winning position, the #47 was adjudged to have cut its pit stop minimum time by just 0.002 of a second to earn themselves a drive through penalty, effectively destroying their race result.

If that wasn’t bad enough to stomach, Sundays second race came harder still with the #47 crew taking to the chequered flag to ‘claim’ the overall race win for a jubilant team only for post-race time penalties amounting to forty seconds being added for both track limits (10 seconds) with a further 30 seconds added for not passing an earlier incident via the pit lane when previously instructed to do so! That sanction left the car that finished P14 on track to take the eventual race win!!