Merhi: Velorex Charge From 27th to GT300 Win “Like a Film”

Photo: SUPER GT

Roberto Merhi described his comeback charge from 27th on the grid to a first GT300 win in Sunday’s SUPER GT race at Fuji Speedway as “like a film”, as he and Velorex Ferrari teammate Yoshiaki Katayama benefitted from last-lap heartbreak for Subaru.

The fight for GT300 honors in the three-hour Golden Week classic was reaching a crescendo as ex-Formula 1 racer Merhi rapidly hunted down the works Subaru BRZ of Takuto Iguchi in the latter stages, closing in by more than a second a lap.

Iguchi went into the final lap with a little over two seconds in hand over Merhi as he bid to end a three-year winless run for Subaru, but halfway round the lap smoke starting pouring from the car’s bonnet and he was forced to pull over at the side of the track.

It paved the way for Merhi to complete a miraculous recovery from second-to-last on the grid, following a problem with the Velorex Ferrari 296 GT3’s turbo boost pressure control system, and give the team its first win in the GT300 category.

“Today’s race was amazing, it was like a film I would say!” recalled Merhi. “We started from 27th and having a bad qualifying due to an issue, so to overtake so many cars at the beginning… I think I overtook around 20 cars, which is not bad! It was good fun.

“Yoshi did a great job in his stint and making some nice overtakes. He was consistent, and then he gave me the car back with one hour and five minutes to the end. I knew the gap to the leader was very far, but I knew the Subaru always struggles with tire degradation with the Dunlops even though they are very fast on one lap.

“I knew if I wanted a chance I had to push really hard, to make them push even harder and damage his tires. I was doing qualifying laps until the very end.

“On the last lap I could see smoke coming out of the car, I didn’t know what happened, I didn’t know if this was normal… and then I started seeing a bit too much smoke!

“It’s not like I like to win from someone else having a failure, but this is part of racing. Sometimes it happens to us, sometimes it happens to others.

“It ended up in a happy way for us, even if it started in a bad way. It’s probably the best race I did, also my teammate and my team. Super-grateful to be here.”

Merhi was keen to pay tribute to how far the Velorex team, formerly known as Team LeMans, has come in the three years since he joined the team to partner Katayama, the pair initially driving an Audi before switching to Ferrari machinery last year.

“It’s my fourth year in SUPER GT, and when I started here things were a bit messy with the performance of the car and Yoshi and the team,” said Merhi. “But now I am happy to see how much Yoshi and the team have improved in these four years.

“We have worked hard, myself also, to be able to get his victory and to be competitive all the time. I am so proud of the team.”

Subaru Boss Ozawa Reflects on Nerve-Wracking Closing Stages

Amid Velorex’s celebrations, Subaru were left to reflect on a painful near-miss as Iguchi and Hideki Yamauchi missed out on what would have been a first victory for the R&D Sport-run team since the August Fuji round in 2022 with the heavily-revised BRZ.

Team director Masahiro Ozawa confirmed to the official SUPER GT website that the issue that caused the car to fail was engine-related, and that the team had been aware of some kind of problem for 40 laps before the dramatic last-lap stoppage.

“We were really worried about it,” said Ozawa. “When the leading GT500 car passed the start/finish line [with around 10 seconds left on the clock], I was thinking I really wanted the race to stop then… that’s how on the edge it was.

“The No. 6 car [Velorex Ferrari] was really fast in the closing stages, running 1:37 lap times. But when we had clean air, we were running in the 1:38s, so I think we had enough of a margin to make it to the end [while keeping the lead].

“We had come up with a plan to win — if we run at this pace, consume this much fuel, use the tires this much, we would have a good chance to win. Today we executed a race exactly like that, so it feels like everything we have been working on has borne fruit.

“Of course today is extremely frustrating, but I think we will get more chances. However, to win when so much is going on, you need luck, and this time were not blessed by luck. We haven’t won a race since 2022 and we let a valuable chance slip by.”

Iguchi and Yamauchi were ultimately classified eighth despite not reaching the checkered flag as the rest of the GT300 field finished a lap down or more.