By popular demand, RJ is back to preview the 2025 Super Formula Championship – since a lot of people seemed to like last year’s edition.
And at 12 rounds, this is the biggest calendar in the 53-year history of Japanese Top Formula racing – despite the fact that a planned round at Inje Speedium in South Korea was cut from the provisional calendar, and not for the first time in series history.
The season starts this weekend with the first double-header weekend at Suzuka Circuit, with two races, one each on Saturday and Sunday.
2025 Calendar & Changes
| Round | Venue | Date |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Suzuka Circuit | 8 March |
| 2 | Suzuka Circuit | 9 March |
| 3 | Mobility Resort Motegi | 19 April |
| 4 | Mobility Resort Motegi | 20 April |
| 5 | Autopolis | 18 May |
| 6 | Fuji Speedway | 19 July |
| 7 | Fuji Speedway | 20 July |
| 8 | Sportsland Sugo | 10 August |
| 9 | Fuji Speedway | 11 October |
| 10 | Fuji Speedway | 12 October |
| 11 | Suzuka Circuit (JAF Grand Prix) | 22 November |
| 12 | Suzuka Circuit (JAF Grand Prix) | 23 November |
Trips to Suzuka bookend the calendar as they did in 2024, but now the opening race meeting is a double-header (one of five on the calendar!) and due to scheduling changes in the All-Japan Road Race Championship, the JSB1000 motorcycle series (aka the Nagasuka Challenge) will not be the co-main event of the weekend.
Instead, the “2&4 Race” event moves to Motegi, which has also moved up in the calendar from August to April. And like Suzuka, Motegi will be a double-header weekend for Super Formula.
Same goes for the two trips to Fuji, including the July round which was held as a single race in 2024 – and was also the inaugural Princess Yohko Cup race. Speaking of which, the Princess was just made the honourary President of Super Formula this year!
That leaves two single-header events, one at Autopolis in May, and one at Sportsland Sugo, which has moved from June to August. Along with Inje being cut before it ever got going, Okayama remains a regrettable absence from the calendar due to financial differences.
2025 also brings a significant change in the weekend format for 1-race and 2-race events.
Doubleheader Weekends: Saturday’s races are now slightly shorter, at approximately 165 kilometres. The pit window for mandatory tyre changes is still from the end of lap 10 to the end of the penultimate lap of the race.
Sunday’s races are slightly longer, approximately 185km long. Teams still have to come in and change tyres during the race, but there is no designated window during the race to make that pit stop – you can come in at any time after the green flag.
There is also additional practice set aside for Friday, with two 60-minute Free Practices. (NASCAR fans and stakeholders look in stunned disbelief that a series would actually give its competitors more time to prepare their cars.)
Singleheader Weekends: ~185km race with a mandatory pit stop for tyres, but no designated pit window, as above.
Series tyre supplier Yokohama has also brought a new construction of tyre, with more renewable materials (46%, versus the intended goal of 35%). The feedback of these new tyres is that they’re a softer compound, but a stiffer construction, than the 2024 racing tyres. Yokohama was keen to improve driving performance and the warm-up process, particularly for its wet tyres.
Most drivers only got one day to test these new tyres (the pre-season test at Suzuka in February was cut short due to snow on the second day) so there will be an element of ‘flying blind’ for a lot of drivers going into the opening round.
I’ve also heard pessimism that removing the compulsory pit window will only lead to races where every car pits after lap one – and thus takes strategy completely out of the picture. But a lot of that hinges on how quickly the tyres fall off. I have a hunch that these fears will be put to rest this weekend.
The biggest change for Super Formula that you won’t see on the track is one that’s overdue: More FIA Super License points to the top ten drivers, 30 for the series’ champion. It’s about damn time – and I’d still argue that the champion should be entitled to 40 points. It’s just a shame that in this field, nobody jumps out as an obvious candidate for Formula One promotion, as we had to start each of the last two seasons.
The grid is bigger this year – by one car – giving us a nice, even 22 cars and drivers. Five drivers will contend for Rookie of the Year honours. Another returns to the series after a two-year absence. And with drivers from four foreign countries, Super Formula has its biggest contingent of foreign drivers since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
But it is without two champions who’ve been a part of the series for a decade and a half, and have now retired from single-seater racing.
Three-time Super Formula Champion Naoki Yamamoto retired after 15 seasons in the series. He was Honda’s ace of the 2010s, winning an additional two championships in the GT500 class of SUPER GT – and in the process, becoming the first driver to win the Japanese ‘Double Championship’ twice. In another timeline, he may have reached Formula One through his domestic success.
His racing career was in jeopardy after suffering a neck injury in a 2023 SUPER GT accident at Sportsland Sugo, and a seemingly minor but jarring crash at Fuji last October – in which Yamamoto had to be taken to hospital for further evaluation – led him and his boss, Satoru Nakajima, to agree to let him retire gracefully.
Yamamoto will remain in Super Formula as the first chairman of the JRP Athlete Committee, which will work closely with the Formula Racing Drivers Association (FRDA) in order to shape the future of the series. And he’ll continue to drive the Stanley Honda Civic Type R-GT in SUPER GT this year, aiming for his third GT500 title. In the latter, I sincerely hope he can finish out his top-flight racing career on his own terms, and not through another injury.
2016 Super Formula Champion Yuji Kunimoto retired quietly after the last race of the season, after 14 years in the series and a memorable, improbable run to the title in which he upset the likes of Yamamoto and Stoffel Vandoorne for the crown.
He did end up being a ‘one-year wonder’ as his post-2016 performances trailed off, perhaps, but like a Kenny Roberts Jnr or a Damon Hill, his name is still on the roll of champions, and it led to awesome opportunities like driving for the factory Toyota Gazoo Racing team at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2017. Kunimoto got to achieve what his older brother Keisuke should have before his career abruptly finished way, way too soon, and is still highly respected in the paddocks of Japanese racing.
Like Yamamoto, Kunimoto will continue to race in SUPER GT for Team WedsSport Bandoh, and in the Super Taikyu Series for SHADE Racing.
The series has also said goodbye (at least for now) to a pack of former race winners – Ukyo Sasahara, Hiroki Otsu, and Nobuharu Matsushita who’ve all been asked to hand back their ‘second swords’ to Toyota and Honda. Iori Kimura, just a year after getting the call up to the series, was not only dropped from Super Formula – but dropped from Honda’s factory driver roster.
⭐ – denotes champion, one star for each title // 🔰 – denotes 2025 rookie
Hazama Ando Triple Tree Racing (Honda)
#10 – Juju Noda (21st in standings; best finish of 12th)
Super Formula’s newest team is Triple Tree Racing, named because the three principal figures of the team all have the kanji for “tree” in their name: Publicist and general manager Hiroki Muraji, team principal and series veteran Hideki Noda, and of course the star of the show, his daughter Juju, entering her second season.
Ready for a burning hot take? Relative to the cynical expectations placed on her, Juju did well in her rookie year at TGM. Yes, she was usually the last-place finisher and qualifier, and there were little things I saw like her defensive driving tactics that I didn’t enjoy. But after the first race of the season, she finished every race on the lead lap and never missed the 107% mark, two targets that some would have thought were beyond her abilities. Remember, she leapt from club-level formula racing in Europe to Super Formula, which is a bit like going from playing recreational league basketball to the NBA in one off-season.
But now, after breaking with TGM amidst their uncertain situation, Juju heads into year two with a brand new team. One with good people like advisor Nagataka Tezuka (ex-Mugen team principal) and Akinori Kasai (her race engineer, who also worked with her father and Kamui Kobayashi), but not as proven a quantity as the staff at TGM/Servus Japan. That makes me worry that her results won’t improve even if her overall racecraft does.
I’ve been more sympathetic to Juju than most of the motorsport otaku out there, and I still value her presence in the sport – even if I’ve resigned myself to the fact that she won’t become what everyone, myself included, thought she’d become when we first learned about the child driving formula cars.
She’s a genuine drawing card that puts mainstream attention on Super Formula that the series has desperately needed for years. Juju will become the most experienced woman in series history this weekend – but that record was only a lowly nine starts, and hopefully her participation will inspire other women to follow her path into this series.
Even if it’s just the damning praise of “being a better last,” that’s progress for Juju in 2025. Will Triple Tree Racing be up to the task? It’s tough. As always, I want her to continue to have fun racing, which it seems like she is.
ThreeBond Racing (Honda)
#12 – Atsushi Miyake (24th in standings; best finish of 14th x2)
You’re looking at the team that’s being tipped by insiders to go from languishing in the doldrums to being a dark horse candidate for podiums, wins, perhaps more. ThreeBond Racing has changed a lot in recent years. It began as Drago Corse, led by Honda legend Ryo Michigami. They went away, came back, then ThreeBond took over the commercial side of the team as Michigami/Drago Corse’s role lessened, disappearing over the winter.
Another Honda legend, Koudai Tsukakoshi, takes his place as team principal, but to the hardcore fans, the game changer for ThreeBond is the acquisition of decorated race engineer Toshihiro Ichise from Team Mugen. Ichise is the strategist and crew chief that worked with Tomoki Nojiri across his entire Mugen tenure, highlighted by his two outstanding championship seasons from 2021-22.
Keeping Atsushi Miyake for a second season felt like a concession that nobody else wanted to drive here, if you only looked at last year’s form in Super Formula. That does a disservice to Miyake’s talents that made him a winner in F4, Super Formula Lights, GT300 and now – as a Nissan factory driver – GT500, too. As an independent driver, he scored a podium in just his third Super Formula race, in 2022 with Team Goh.
There’s excitement here, that’s been relayed by Miyake, Tsukakoshi, and Ichise but they’re trying to keep modest goals – making Q2, finishing in the top ten, et cetera. Testing times only mean so much even in a series with spec chassis. But this time last year, Miyake was struggling just to stay ahead of Juju on the leaderboard. This pre-season, he was third-fastest. That shouldn’t be completely discounted.
Perhaps pump the brakes on a title challenge but with the overhauls that ThreeBond has made, they will not be trapped in backmarker purgatory in 2025. If they get it right, Miyake will return to the podium.
docomo Business ROOKIE (Toyota)
#14 – Kazuya Oshima (19th in standings; best finish of 11th x2)
With Naoki Yamamoto and Yuji Kunimoto’s retirements, ROOKIE Racing’s Kazuya Oshima is now the longest-tenured driver in Super Formula (despite sitting out all but one race from 2013-2016), and the last driver to drive a V8-powered car in the series.
He’s been ROOKIE Racing’s only Super Formula driver since it entered the league in 2020, and collectively, they’re still trying to crack the podium for the first time. Over the last three seasons, Oshima and ROOKIE have gone from pointless, to scoring the team’s best-ever finish (4th), back to pointless. This despite being the private label team of Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda. This despite being loaded with top-shelf engineering talent and boasting a world-class headquarters right outside the entrance to Fuji Speedway.
Oshima and team principal Hiroaki Ishiura – himself a two-time Super Formula Champion – both feel that despite going without a single point, that the team is making forward progress at every track, not content to be Sugo specialists. Yoshihiko Kitani and Ryan Dingle (the soothing Canadian voice on the radio of the #8 Toyota GR010) will be back as race engineer and consultant, respectively, to provide further continuity.
It’s just frustrating to observe from the outside because a team that’s this well-resourced should already be fighting for wins and championships instead of treading water with a single car. The feeling from some fans is that they won’t move forward until Oshima retires. For a driver that’s won championships in both SUPER GT classes – and at one point, was Toyota’s young prodigy of the future – I can’t imagine how low that has to feel. As a reminder, it’s now been almost 15 years since his only Super Formula win (a last-lap upset at Sugo in 2010).
I would like to see them back in the points, at minimum, in the year that Oshima becomes the 15th driver in series history to make 100 starts or more.
San-Ei Gen with B-Max (Honda)
#50 – Syun Koide 🔰 (2024 Super Formula Lights Champion)
B-Max Racing has just one Super Formula win to its name, and has seldom come close to replicating that result ever since. They have become the de facto Honda junior team in Super Formula Lights and F4, which has also given B-Max access to Honda’s top prospects coming up the HFDP pipeline.
What a tricky spot that 24-year-old rookie Syun (“shoon”) Koide has dropped into, though. His predecessor Iori Kimura only cracked the top ten twice last season, and it led Honda to not only drop Kimura outright as a factory driver over the winter – but it wasn’t all down to sheer performance, it has to be said. Koide will hope to avoid being another “one-and-done” driver and he should be under less pressure to do that.
He arrives as the reigning Super Formula Lights champion, just like Kimura. Koide has also won the Japanese F4 title, won on his SUPER GT GT300 debut, and all this for a driver who didn’t start organised car racing until he was 20. I spoke with him for RACER.com last winter and he feels confident that he’s ready for prime time with his natural, effortless speed and fighting spirit. Not just in Super Formula – he’s also been picked to succeed Kakunoshin Ohta in GT500, too.
He’ll be working with fellow rookie, race engineer Kanta Murai – under a leadership structure headed up by the legend, Satoshi Motoyama, returning as team principal for another season. Koide should look to meet and exceed what Kimura did last season and more frequently challenge for points, and a big factor in that should be qualifying.
As for that second car that Koide’s American doppelganger Nolan Siegel could have driven at the end of last year…it is what it is, papaya happens.
KDDI TGMGP TGR-DC (Toyota)
#28 – Kazuto Kotaka (14th in standings; 2 top-10s, best finish 8th x2)
#29 – Hibiki Taira (17th in standings; 2 top-10s, best finish 9th x2 in 4 races)
This is technically year three for Team Goh’s “phoenix club,” TGM Grand Prix. But after an extensive off-season overhaul headlined by a switch to Toyota engines, it really feels like a brand-new team.
So what’s different? Talented engineering firm Servus Japan still manages all the racing operations. TOM’S now handles the commercial operations, and brought in telecom giant KDDI to be the title sponsor. Overseeing it all is Akio Toyoda, the Chairman of Toyota Motor Corporation, who envisions this team as a stepping stone for Toyota’s best young drivers to reach Super Formula through the Toyota Gazoo Racing Driver Challenge (TGR-DC) academy. Hence the very silly triple-acronym name on the entry list.
Managing the team is Tatsuya Kataoka, a respected veteran driver and the principal of the TGR-DC Racing School, along with technical director Satofumi Hoshi, an accomplished engineer that’s worked with the likes of Gasly, O’Ward, and others from his time at Mugen. This does feel a bit like Toyota’s version of Toro Rosso, and they’re backing it up by putting two TGR-DC prospects in their cars for the season.
Kotaka joins after two frustrating seasons at Kondo Racing, and while he’s still only 25, this year feels like his last shot to stick around in Super Formula. While he’s won the Super Formula Lights title in 2022, Kotaka’s success in lower formulae hasn’t translated here across three seasons, but a new environment might be what he needs to snap out of this malaise.
Despite this being his first full season, Taira’s four races at Impul last year burned up his rookie status in 2024. The Okinawa native dominated F4 in 2020, and came close to winning the Super Formula Lights and GT300 championships in 2023. He’ll have a bit less pressure to perform straight away at least.
It was becoming apparent that being the black sheep of the Honda family wasn’t going to be tenable for much longer, and while I’ll miss TGM’s independent spirit of recent years, I’d feel worse to have two seats disappear from the grid. How they’ll go in this new life is anyone’s guess, but you’d have to think Toyota doesn’t want to sink money into a perennial backmarker.
Itochu Enex WeCars Team Impul (Toyota)
#19 – Oliver Rasmussen 🔰 (19th in 2024 FIA World Hypercar Drivers’ Championship)
#20 – Mitsunori Takaboshi 🔰 (2 spot starts from 2020-21, 3rd in 2024 SUPER GT GT500 Class)
There’s no sugarcoating it: 2024 was the worst season ever for Super Formula’s most successful team ever. Team Impul cratered hard last year, chipping in a total of three top-10s and a best finish of sixth. Now, second-generation team principal Kazuki Hoshino is rebuilding around a new core of engineers, and two rookie drivers with vastly different backgrounds.
All of it seemed to cascade after the prized pick-up of last off-season, Theo Pourchaire, departed Impul for the McLaren IndyCar team, which led to another messier situation across the Pacific. But I have to make this clear: Pourchaire didn’t quit on Impul because of one bad race, as some hyper-territorial fans still are led to believe. He told Jamie Klein that he only had the budget to run the first race, which represents an egregious failure on the part of his former F1 employers. Ben Barnicoat, Nyck de Vries, and Hibiki Taira all stepped up to fill the vacancy as best as they could.
Now they have a foreign talent that actually has a secure future. Oliver Rasmussen (no relation to Christian) is making a small bit of history as the first Super Formula driver from Denmark since 1996 – a certain ‘Mr. Le Mans’, Tom Kristensen. He’s committed to a new career in Japan with drives in both Super Formula and SUPER GT, following success in Formula Regional Europe, a WEC LMP2 race win, and a one-year stint as a Hypercar driver with Hertz Team JOTA.
Rasmussen also arrives with a new engineer, Honduran-American Oscar Zelaya, whose CV most recently included a stop at IMSA’s Action Express Racing.
Mitsunori Takaboshi is far from a conventional rookie. He’s made two starts in Super Formula during the COVID years. He’s a Nissan factory GT500 driver who’s also tested in Formula E for what seems like an eternity, and he has two All-Japan F3 titles, in 2013 and 2017. He’s getting his first big break at age 32 thanks to his work driving the Toyota development vehicle over the last two years. It means he’s also more familiar with the new tyre than any other driver, too.
The last time Impul took a chance on an older rookie who looked like they’d never get a proper chance in Super Formula, Yuhi Sekiguchi turned into a perennial threat for wins and titles. Takaboshi can hope to emulate that success, and his new race engineer Takuji Murata has won four championships – including two at his last go-round with Impul.
Worryingly, they weren’t far off the bottom of the testing leaderboard and one hopes that Impul isn’t facing another season unbecoming of the standard set by the legendary Kazuyoshi Hoshino.
Sanki Vertex Partners Cerumo-INGING (Toyota)
#38 – Sena Sakaguchi (12th in standings; 1 pole, 3 top-10s, best finish of 4th)
#39 – Toshiki Oyu (9th in standings; 1 podium, 5 top-10s, best finish of 2nd)
A bit worryingly, INGING and Cerumo’s joint programme has gone four full seasons since its last win. But they certainly have the talent to turn things around and avoid being overlooked in such a competitive series.
Toyota hit it big by luring Oyu from an increasingly-untenable relationship with Honda. The stylish driver from Hokkaido started his first campaign at Cerumo-INGING slowly but then found his best form again in the middle of the season, including getting the team its only podium on the season at Fuji on a day where Sho Tsuboi just wouldn’t be beaten. Team principal Yuji Tachikawa enjoys having Oyu on his team and he’s taken a step towards slaying his ‘wild child’ reputation for good.
Sakaguchi had an up and down season that began with his first pole at Suzuka, but also had a string of rotten luck in the middle of the year that seemed to begin when he crashed in morning warm-up before the rain-drenched Sugo event. That damaged the monocoque and, around the same time, Sakaguchi’s season was plagued by eletrical gremlins.
He’ll be eager to finally capture his first win in the series, while Oyu is eager to get his first win on the board since his rookie year in 2020 – now working with a new race engineer, Shintaro Okajima, who also strategises for Cerumo in SUPER GT.
Ten years ago, Cerumo-INGING went on to win three straight drivers’ championships with unlikely heroes Hiroaki Ishiura (a late-bloomer all throughout his career) and Yuji Kunimoto. I think it’s possible for them to capture the winning form this year, in fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if both their drivers reached the top step. We’ll just have to wait and see…
Kondo Racing (Toyota)
#3 – Kenta Yamashita (7th in standings; 1 pole, 2 podiums, 8 top-10s, best finish of 2nd x2)
#4 – Zak O’Sullivan 🔰 (16th in 2024 FIA F2 Championship, 2 wins)
Kondo Racing celebrates its 25th anniversary as a full-fledged racing team in 2025. They’ve won four races with four different drivers – four good ones – but only once has this team ever won either of the two major championships, the 2018 Teams’ Championship
The conundrum that Kenta Yamashita faces in his ninth season – all with Kondo Racing – is simple. He’s been the lead driver for most of that time, and his all-around natural abilities as a driver – punctuated by his All-Japan F3 and two SUPER GT GT500 Championships – make him indispensable to Team Director Masahiko “Matchy” Kondo. Also, because he drives for a perennial midfield team, it feels like he doesn’t have the resources to compete for a title. “Yamaken” has now gone five years since his last win in Super Formula, which is absurd for someone who’s more than good enough to be a multi-time series champion.
That said, Yamashita did finish second twice, as close as he’s come to getting back on the top step in some time. He will have a new race engineer this year, Toshiomi Oeki – who most recently worked alongside Ryo Hirakawa during his best seasons in Super Formula. And he’ll have a new team-mate looking to start fresh in Japan, the surprise signing of the winter, Zak O’Sullivan – late of the Williams Racing Academy.
When I look at O’Sullivan’s CV in British and European racing, I think – “How on earth did nobody pony up the funds to keep him in the ladder to F1?” He voluntarily dropped out of F2 due to a lack of funds, less than a year after finishing runner-up in the F3 standings. Kondo Racing likes their new acquisition though. He quickly got up to speed as the fastest rookie in the February pre-season test, vindicating the decision to go with him over a handful of Toyota factory drivers. And his race engineer, Kazuya Abe, won two titles alongside Naoki Yamamoto.
This could always be the year that Kondo Racing finally turns the corner and gets back in the win column – they’ve undoubtedly got the driving and engineering talent to do it.
PONOS Nakajima Racing (Honda)
#64 – Ren Sato (11th in standings; 5 top-10s, best finish of 5th x2)
#65 – Igor Fraga 🔰 (4th in 2023 Super Formula Lights; 2024 reserve driver)
Let it be said that nobody can replace Naoki Yamamoto. But Nakajima Racing is leaning into beginning anew with youth at its side. Satoru Nakajima’s team took a similar approach in 2019/20 with the likes of Makino, Oyu, and some kid from Barcelona named Alex (whatever happened to him?) leading the way in that time. For the most part, it worked.
That means giving 23-year-old driver, and officially credited anime illustrator/seiyuu Sato (no relation) the status of being the team’s lead driver. As young as he is, the 2022 Rookie of the Year is entering his fourth season, and it needs to be a good one. He was genuinely unfortunate at times last year, and he did begin to show strength in the second half of last season. Sato has frequently shown bursts of ludicrous pace in Super Formula – but at minimum, he must find a way back onto the podium for the first time since his rookie season.
Igor Omura Fraga’s Super Formula debut is a long time coming. He had to sacrifice two years of his real-world racing career because he couldn’t relocate to Japan during the pandemic. He tested the SF23 several times, paid his dues racing in Super Formula Lights, working as a series ambassador, and as Nakajima Racing’s reserve driver last year. And now, the four-time Gran Turismo World Series champion will become the second Gran Turismo esports export to race in the series. He was quick during the December ‘Rookie Test’ and again in the pre-season test in February despite a crash.
I think it’s possible that Fraga can match Sato’s performance this year and come away with Rookie of the Year honours in 2025. We think of him as a ‘gamer turned racer’ but in reality, Fraga was an accomplished full-metal driver before Gran Turismo gave him a bigger spotlight, and on his best days, he’s as good or better than some of F1’s very best.
This is a very fascinating team currently positioned in the upper midfield, but with room to improve thanks to the driving talent and the experienced staff supporting them. As a reminder, only Impul has more wins and championships in this series than Nakajima Racing.
Kids com Team KCMG (Toyota)
#7 – Kamui Kobayashi (10th in standings; 1 podium, 6 top-10s, best finish of 3rd)
#8 – Nirei Fukuzumi (6th in standings; 2 poles, 2 podiums, 8 top-10s, best finish of 2nd x2)
KCMG, the only non-Japanese team in the series (originating from Hong Kong, with a Japanese headquarters near Fuji Speedway) is pounding at the door of its long-awaited first win after its best-ever season as a Super Formula team. It’s been 15 years in the making. Could it finally happen this year?
Fukuzumi’s transfer from Honda/ThreeBond to Toyota/KCMG injected everyone with new energy, including himself, after two years of being lost in the malaise. His bounceback 2024 season had him looking like the driver who many believe has the most sheer pace of anyone in Japanese motorsport. Fukuzumi was the catalyst of KCMG’s fourth-place finish in the Teams’ Championship, a new benchmark. And were it not for unforced pit work errors that have been the achilles heel of this team for years, he might well have gotten KCMG its first win.
Kobayashi, meanwhile, snapped a five-year drought between podium finishes in Super Formula and, elsewhere, he’s still one of international motorsport’s most electric drivers. In his 10th ‘full’ season, Kobayashi’s pursuit of a long-awaited first win in Super Formula will be one of the overriding storylines of the season, as he enters 2025 with renewed confidence. It no longer feels like this is just a past-time for him just to spend less time sitting in board meetings.
Both drivers cracked the top five in the pre-season testing leaderboards and it feels like that could hold up . Fukuzumi could stand to just keep doing what he’s doing. Kobayashi only needs to improve his qualifying from a sub-par average position of 13.56 last year (and only three Q2 appearances), not what you’d expect from a driver synonymous with blistering speed and ruthless aggression.
As constructed, this team is too good not to reach the top step of the podium. I think it’s telling that Team Principal Ryuji Doi told the press that the team wasn’t satisfied with its results because of the opportunities that slipped away. I like that attitude. I simply hope the racing gods don’t allow a faulty wheel gun to let KCMG’s mechanics down at the worst time, again.
Note: TGM reserve driver Seita Nonaka will replace Kobayashi for the Motegi double-header, as announced this week.
Team Mugen (Honda)
#15 – Ayumu Iwasa (5th in standings; 1 pole, 3 podiums, 8 top-10s, best finish of 2nd x3)
#16 – Tomoki Nojiri ⭐⭐ (2nd in standings; 2 wins, 2 poles, 4 podiums, 9 top-10s)
It says a lot that a year in which Tomoki Nojiri won two races and was still the best qualifier in the series by average starting position, in which Ayumu Iwasa scored three podiums and won the Rookie of the Year award in a landslide, and where Team Mugen was a close second in the Teams’ Championship, could be seen as a disappointment.
There’s nothing disappointing about the new look of the Mugen cars – I’ll miss the traditional Red Bull livery on the Super Formula grid, but the Autobacs orange and black – through Mugen’s tie-up with ARTA in SUPER GT – looks incredible on the SF23.
Nojiri, the 2021 and 2022 Super Formula Champion, finished third and second in points the last two years and is far from a depreciated asset, even at 35 years of age. He’s now one win away from fifth on the all-time Super Formula wins list, and one pole position away from tying Satoshi Motoyama’s ‘JRP Era’ record (from 1996 to today). He’s hit his peak at an age where others would be at risk of falling away, but some fear that Super Formula’s move to common dampers last year took a lot of the potency out of Nojiri and Mugen’s attack.
Nojiri’s opening-round win at Suzuka felt like an outlier in a season that would be great for most, but not for him – not these days. He’s also going to have to go on without engineer Toshihiro Ichise in his corner, who’s now moved on to ThreeBond and been replaced by Kento Taguchi, who’s been promoted from being Ayumu Iwasa’s performance engineer.
Then there’s Iwasa, back for his second season and fired up to finally notch his first win after a solid rookie campaign, where he didn’t look out of his depth compared to his much more experienced team-mate – not by a long shot.
I expect Iwasa will get his first victory some time this year, perhaps in the first half. From what I’ve read, the new spec tyres seem to be more to his liking. And race engineer Tomohiko Koike might firmly be in the top three strategists the series has, based on his recent track record with Liam Lawson and Ukyo Sasahara before him.
Iwasa will also be a reserve driver for the Racing Bulls F1 Team this year and should get an FP1 cameo at Suzuka. I just have a sour feeling that Iwasa is down a dead-end road when it comes to any hope of reaching the F1 grid. What I’ve seen from him in Japan and Europe suggests that he’d be a good addition to F1, whether or not he had Honda’s backing…but he wouldn’t have had the opportunity to race in F2, F3, and French F4 without Honda’s support.
And with Honda scaling back to supplying just one team next year, leaving Yuki Tsunoda’s future so up in the air that Koji Watanabe and Takuma Sato are both going on record urging Tsunoda to leave the nest if he has to…what chance does Iwasa have of making it even if he wins the Super Formula title in 2025? If I’m him, I simply block all that out and focus on making a name for yourself at home, starting now.
Docomo Team Dandelion Racing (Honda)
#5 – Tadasuke Makino (3rd in standings; 2 wins, 4 podiums, 8 top-10s)
#6 – Kakunoshin “Kaku” Ohta (4th in standings; 2 wins, 6 top-10s)
Dandelion Racing, a team of only 25 full-time employees, beat traditional Japanese powerhouses Mugen and TOM’S to win the Teams’ Championship last season – and not for the first time either. Together their drivers, Tadasuke Makino from Osaka and Kakunoshin Ohta from Kyoto, posted four wins and it’s very realistic either driver could win the championship this year.
Makino’s roar of joy and triumph when he finally got his first Super Formula win at Autopolis was one of the defining images of last season. And a second win at Motegi bolstered his title hopes which ultimately came apart at the final weekend.
It’s worth remembering that at one point, he was on Honda’s overseas training programme, racing against drivers who now proliferate the front of the F1 grid in European F3 and Formula 2. (The streets will never, ever forget Monza 2018). Makino has always had game-breaking speed behind the wheel of a race car going back to his first GT300 race in the old Lotus Evora Mother Chassis, and going back to his All-Japan F3 days.
I’ll let you in on a secret: I picked Makino – the fastest driver in the abbreviated pre-season test – to win the title in the pilot episode of the Japan Racing Roundup Podcast. And yet, you can’t ignore that he faces a very, very difficult challenge from Ohta within his own team.
2025 is obviously the year where Ohta is going on an excursion tour in America, running select IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship events – he just made his Daytona 24 Hours debut in one of Meyer Shank Racing’s Acura ARX-06es, and will be driving an LMP2 at Sebring the week after the opening race. It’s very clear that HRC, both in Japan and America, see something special in him.
So do I. Ohta withstood an injury-riddled, terrible start to his 2023 rookie year to get his first win by the end of the year. He channeled the anger of losing last year’s Motegi race due to an unforced error, into a commanding sweep of the JAF Suzuka GP weekend.
All he needs this year is to avoid those torrid stretches like the one he endured last year where he went 14th, DNS, 19th in three races and he can – and I expect, he will – compete for the championship. Will that put a strain on his amicable partnership with Makino? They were battling hard for the lead at Motegi last year, until Ohta spun trying to keep his older team-mate behind him.
You never know – this could be Ohta’s last shot at a Super Formula title, if only because he could get whisked away to a different stage. Could you imagine what could be in store for Ohta if we knew that Honda was committed to IndyCar long term? If there was a customer ready to run the Acura ARX-06 in WEC? If only…
Vantelin Team TOM’S (Toyota)
#1 – Sho Tsuboi ⭐ (Series Champion; 3 wins, 1 pole, 6 podiums, 8 top-10s)
#37 – Sacha Fenestraz (Returning after two-year absence; 2022 – 2nd in standings, 1 win)
Whether it’s baseball in Los Angeles or auto racing in Japan, 2024 was the year of history-making, championship-winning Sho-time.
Sho Tsuboi obviously can’t throw 160 km/h fastballs or hit a baseball off the back wall of the Tokyo Dome like Ohtani, but he did make a fateful, legacy-defining move last offseason. Tsuboi’s move to TOM’S in Super Formula yielded the results that a lot of people, including myself, knew were possible deep down: Three wins – sweeping all three Fuji Speedway races – and his first series title. Make it a double, after he won his third GT500 championship in SUPER GT in the last four years with TOM’S.
Unlike his predecessor Ritomo Miyata who’s used his Double Championship to springboard towards international competition, Tsuboi seems like he’s content to be the standard-bearer for Toyota in Japan – though it is telling that Akio Toyoda himself came out after Tsuboi won the GT500 title and said that, “We should work on studying English.” It tells me that they’re open to seeing if he would like to venture abroad, some day.
Tsuboi enters the season as a strong choice to repeat as champion, and while four of his five career wins have come at Fuji…after starting the 2024 with an 11th place finish, he never finished lower than fifth all season. That’s the sort of consistency that wins championships every year in Super Formula. He can perform anywhere on the calendar.
TOM’S only finished third in the Teams’ Championship because, in defiance of what I’d proclaimed last year, Ukyo Sasahara went scoreless in 2024, and now it’s been quite some time since TOM’S had both of its Super Formula cars consistently scoring points.
So if Giuliano Alesi and Sasahara – both former winners in this series, it has to be said – couldn’t consistently match the level of Miyata and Tsuboi, who has TOM’S gotten to try and fix the problem? None other than Sacha Fenestraz, who’s back as a Toyota factory driver after getting a brutal dismissal from the Nissan Formula E Team after two frustrating seasons.
It’s a shame Fenestraz never worked out in FE because he was clearly taking after what Nick Cassidy had done before him, achieving success on the Japanese circuit and using that to springboard into international competition. When Sacha is on his game, he’s a race winner and championship challenger.
Though, since testing the SF23 for the first time in December and again in February, he’s admitted that the offseason has been spent reacclimating to driving a more traditional, petrol-powered race car. He is going to be at a stronger team than Kondo Racing, in theory, but that also means going up against Tsuboi in his prime. It won’t be easy but I think it’s possible Fenestraz can find his way back onto the podium quickly. Surely, a third driver won’t struggle just to score points in a title-winning team, right? ….Right?
Before we go, sincere congratulations to friend of the show and one-time M101 guest host Jens Sobotta on his new role with Japan Race Promotion. (This is the one X post I will share.)
Thank you to Jamie Klein for having me on Japan Racing Roundup Podcast’s first episode, and to Tooru Kitajima for his tireless work in keeping the numbers and the stats on the entire 52-year history of Japanese Top Formula racing.
If you’re reading this now, Motorsport TV has this weekend’s races and qualifying on their site to stream for free and the rest of the season as well. The SFgo platform also has both races and qualifying, as well as onboard cameras, radio, and real-time data from the cars. I’ve not been paid to plug either service, I’m just doing it for the love of the game.
Enjoy the season.
All images © JRP
