Superpower

At long last the Class 1 global GT category lives, with DTM and Super GT’s GT500 all but merging technically and even racing against each other. But how have the three Japanese manufacturers managed to adapt to the new formula?

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Just like the coming together of tectonic plates, the merging of the German DTM and Japanese GT500 series has taken a very long time, but finally they featured on track together at the last round of the DTM at Hockenheim in October.

For the first time the six manufacturers ran together in competition, in qualifying and in the second race of the weekend. It was not necessarily a fair fight, the Japanese had brought their old cars to compete against the latest models from the DTM, and the lap times and race results showed a comprehensive win for the Europeans on home soil.

At the time of writing BMW, Audi and Aston Martin were set to go to Fuji, Japan, in November, for a full-scale race weekend that is the next stage of integration before the Japanese Class 1 car race in 2020.

Japan’s 2020 vision

Prior to the German race the Japanese manufacturers – Honda, Nissan and Toyota – presented the new Class 1-compliant cars that will take part in next year’s joint races. Importantly, Honda, a company that said if it needed to run a front-engine layout it would leave the series, has produced a front-engined version of the NSX for next season. In doing so it has now overcome a major stumbling block that has delayed the integration of the two regulations, while also threatening the very existence of the Japanese series.