What’s the second-fastest category of motor racing on the planet after Formula 1? Formula 2? IndyCar? WEC Hypercar? Think again. The answer in fact is Super Formula, Japan’s top single-seater championship. And what about the fastest category of tin-tops – surely, nothing beats Hypercar? In fact, the GT500 class in Super GT is comfortably faster.

At Suzuka, the lap record for Super Formula is 1min 34.442sec set by Nick Cassidy in 2020. That would have cleared the 107% mark (just) for the previous year’s Japanese Grand Prix. As for GT500, the lap record around Fuji Speedway is 1min 25.764sec set by Nirei Fukuzumi in 2021, which is about 2.5sec faster than the WEC pole time from 2024. You’d have to go back several years to the tail end of the LMP1 era to find faster times than that.

These figures go a long way to explaining the ongoing appeal of Japan’s domestic racing scene to overseas drivers. Ask almost any driver who has come to Japan from abroad why they made the move, and the cars are often the first thing they talk about.

Sacha Fenestraz, who raced in Japan from 2019 to 2022, and is back this year after a two-year sojourn in Formula E, says: “You get to drive two of the best cars in the world. They are amazing with the amount of downforce they have, the tyres, plus you get to drive a lot. In Europe it’s not like that any more. As a driver you can develop a lot.”

“Many drivers have described Super Formula as a better stepping stone to F1 than F2”

Part of what makes Super Formula so quick is the spec Dallara chassis tips the scales at just 677kg, including the driver, over 100kg less than F1, while producing an impressive amount of downforce. Exact power figures produced by the Honda and Toyota four-cylinder turbo engines are a closely guarded trade secret, but are estimated to be in the 600-650bhp range. And the spec Yokohama tyre allows drivers to push throughout a race.

Many drivers have described it as a better stepping stone to F1 than F2. Besides the difference in tyres, in Super Formula there’s more onus on the driver to guide the team and mould the car according to his or her own preferences compared to F2, where set-ups tend to be more fixed and drivers make do with what they have.

In recent years Stoffel Vandoorne, Pierre Gasly and Liam Lawson all made the step up to F1 from Super Formula, while Álex Palou used the series as a springboard to go on to dominate IndyCar. Next year, Kalle Rovanperä will be the latest star to try his hand at the series as he plots a course towards F1 after his shock decision to quit the WRC.

It’s common for overseas drivers to take on double programmes in Super Formula and Super GT, where the tyre war is the key to the cars being so quick. Bridgestone, Yokohama and Sumitomo Rubber-owned Dunlop are all locked in a constant race to improve their products in GT500, while in the lower GT300 class, Michelin provides a fourth competitor.

Perhaps the biggest factor in Japan’s attractiveness, though, is its purity. Super Formula is a no-gimmicks, no-frills contest to establish the country’s fastest driver. Super GT features more ups and downs, with a long-established success ballast system to stop one team dominating, but this is easy to understand and isn’t susceptible to political wranglings, making it by far and away preferable to the WEC’s dreaded Balance of Performance.

Bertrand Baguette arrived in Japan in 2014 having competed in Formula Renault 3.5, the WEC’s LMP2 class and IndyCar. Originally racing for Honda, he now represents Nissan in GT500, having won the brand’s most recent championship title in 2022. And the Belgian says the Japanese scene has kept him hooked for more than a decade, despite having had offers to go back to Europe in the meantime.

“What I like about being here is that it’s still ‘real racing’,” says Baguette. “When I started with Nakajima Racing, we had no motorhome, just one chair for two drivers to share, and we had to get changed in the back of the truck! But all the money was going towards the car. There’s no bullshit. Here, if you are fast, you have a job. If you are slow, you won’t have a job any more. I’m still here after all these years because I love it so much.”

“What I like about being in Japan is that it’s ‘real racing’. Here, if you are fast, you have a job”

It’s not just drivers that have built careers in Japan. Canadian engineer Ryan Dingle spent six years in Super Formula and Super GT before joining Toyota’s WEC operation full-time in 2023 – although he remains a regular presence in Japan through his consultancy work for the Akio Toyoda-owned Rookie Racing squad, giving him an almost unique perspective on the European and Japanese scenes.

“The competition is more pure, especially in Super Formula,” observes Dingle. “If you’re the best, you could win every race all year. Super GT is different with the ballast, but it’s still very high-level. And, from an engineering standpoint, Japanese racing is still quite hands-on. It’s not quite as automated as it is in Europe. You can learn a bit more as a youngster than you would in F1 or WEC, where it’s systems-driven. You can make a bigger impact.”

Being able to make an impact also applies to being a foreign journalist, an even bigger rarity in the paddock than overseas drivers and engineers. Since I made the move to Japan in 2019, I’ve usually been the only non-Japanese person in the press room.

So, why did I move to Japan? Partly because I spotted a niche, partly because I felt I needed a new challenge after five seasons reporting on WEC, MotoGP and other series in Europe, and partly because I was still living with my parents in the UK and was keen to fly the nest. But mostly because I fell in love with the country – not just the racing, but the scenery, the food, the clean streets, the on-time public transportation and, most of all, the people, whose kind hospitality has to be experienced first-hand to be truly understood.

The initial trigger for my interest in Japanese motor sport was McLaren’s decision to send then-GP2 champion Vandoorne off to contest Super Formula in 2016, but things reached a new level in 2018 when F1 champion Jenson Button entered Super GT. By this time, I had already had the chance to travel to Japan twice to cover WEC and MotoGP, and, having made some friends on those trips, I decided in 2018 to have a longer stay in the country and visit both the Super Formula finale at Suzuka and Super GT decider at Motegi.

After that trip, my mind was pretty much made. I decided to give living in Japan a try, study the language properly (I’d already started picking up a few words on my previous visit), go to as many races as I could and see where it led. Starting in the autumn of 2019, I attended a language school in the bustling Tokyo district of Shibuya, famous for its ‘scramble’ crossing that would become a feature of my daily commute – at least until the Covid-19 pandemic struck in March 2020 and both school life and the racing world came to a sudden halt.

You might think that moving to Japan barely six months before the onset of a global pandemic was bad timing, and in some senses it was. Travel in and out of the country became almost impossible, leading to a major drop-off in the number of foreign drivers. But there was a silver lining when the racing season resumed in July that year: with no foreign tourists, and with the Japanese government offering discounts on hotels in a bid to generate domestic tourism, getting to races was cheap. That allowed me to visit every race on the Super Formula and Super GT schedule that year out of my own pocket, get to know many of the teams and drivers, and gradually begin to establish myself as a paddock regular.

Juggling language school and work was unquestionably tough, but I soon came to realise that the sacrifice was worthwhile. Some time in early 2021, when I requested an interview with TOM’S team boss Jun Yamada, I was asked by the PR, “Is Japanese OK?” Before I knew it, I found myself putting to use what I had learned in school. Now, interviews in Japanese are no problem and my subjects are always understanding, despite the odd instance of questionable grammar or even forgetting the right word.

In any case, with so many Japanese drivers and team personnel unable to speak English – or, at least, unable to give an insightful interview in English – being able to speak their language is a huge advantage when it comes to relationship-building and finding out what is going on. Misunderstandings still occur, and I have gotten into trouble once or twice for some of the things I’ve written, but then which journalist hasn’t?

Outside of racing, daily life in Japan has its perks as well, especially once you master the lingo. The cost of living, even in a big city like Tokyo, is considerably cheaper than the UK, allowing even a humble motor sport journalist to live in relative comfort. Going on a trip within Japan is not too expensive either, and with the country stretching from tropical Okinawa in the south to snowy Hokkaido in the north, there’s lots of variety.

I still enjoy visits abroad, both to the UK to see family and to the big overseas races like the Le Mans 24 Hours. Certainly, nothing on the scale of Le Mans or the Indy 500 exists in Japan; the lack of such a marquee race is the biggest negative point of the domestic scene. But every time I return to Japanese soil, I feel glad to be home and eagerly anticipate the next time I can watch Super Formula or Super GT up close.

Is Super Formula overtaking Super GT?

Observing Japanese racing before I moved, I had assumed that Super Formula was the more popular of the country’s ‘big two’ series. It was only when I first visited a race that I realised Super GT is historically larger in terms of fan and media interest. However, recent evidence suggests things are slowly changing in Super Formula’s favour.

Super GT has made a couple of high-profile missteps in recent times in a bid to retain fan interest, such as the implementation of an aggregate qualifying system last year (reversed for this year) and a sprint race format at Fuji in 2025 that didn’t prove much of a hit with fans.

Equally, the tyre war that has been such an integral part of the championship is coming to an end. Michelin pulled the plug on its GT500 effort at the end of 2023, leading to a period of Bridgestone domination, and from 2027 there will be a single supplier for each of the classes (unannounced at the time of writing).

Having bounced back from Covid faster than Super Formula, Super GT is now finding its trackside attendance figures plateauing, although the revived Sepang round attracted a crowd that most domestic tracks would look at with envy.

Super GT has tough decisions to make about its next-generation GT500 rules. It goes without saying that Toyota, Honda and a financially ailing Nissan all must be kept on board if the class is to avoid going the way of DTM’s Class 1 formula.

On the other hand, Super Formula appears to have benefited from its closer association with F1 and its growing focus on personalities in the Drive to Survive age. And with Kalle Rovanperä and potentially other high-profile names on the way for ’26, the trend looks set to continue. JK