Pole on Saturday, No Points on Sunday: The Subaru BRZ's Wild Super GT Weekend at Autopolis
The No. 61 Subaru BRZ R&D Sport was the fastest GT300 car at Autopolis on Saturday — Hideki Yamauchi's 1:42.677 earned a record-extending 18th career pole — and it scored no points at all in Sunday's three-hour race, a weekend that sums up Super GT in one result: qualifying speed guarantees nothing over three hours, two safety cars and two mandatory pit stops.
Start with Saturday, because Saturday was genuinely special. In the two-stage knockout qualifying for the Autopolis GT 3 Hours, the flat-six-powered BRZ led both sessions. Takuto Iguchi topped his Q1 group with a 1:44.122, then handed the car to Yamauchi, who went roughly four-tenths of a second quicker than the entire GT300 field with a 1:42.677. It was the BRZ's second pole of the year, and it extended Yamauchi's own all-time record to 18 career GT300 pole positions — nobody in the class's history has more. The car did it carrying 34 kg of success weight, Super GT's points-based handicap, and it led a top five made up entirely of Japanese-built GTA-GT300 cars ahead of the European GT3 machinery.
Sunday had other plans
The Autopolis 3 Hours is not a sprint. With two mandatory pit stops and a long afternoon ahead, Subaru's own pre-race technical notes — a return to the standard bonnet, a new plate around the widened louvres, and a revised layout for left-side refuelling — were all about surviving the race, not winning a lap. Two safety car periods duly shuffled the GT300 order, the second of them triggered when Seita Nonaka crashed the Saitama Green Brave Toyota at Turn 3. When the race settled, the pole-winning BRZ was classified 15th in the final results — outside the points, even after post-race penalties for three other GT300 cars shuffled the final order behind the podium. The pace was real. The result is a reminder of how little that is worth when a three-hour race starts dealing wild cards.
The winners' stories were just as good
GT300 went to a gamble: the K-tunes Lexus RC F GT3 of Shinichi Takagi and Morio Nitta skipped the tire change at its second stop and won by about 20 seconds. Both drivers scored their first wins since 2019 — with a combined age of 115. Behind them, penalties promoted the Tomei Sports Nissan GT-R to second and the LEON Racing Mercedes-AMG to third in the revised results.
In GT500, Honda's HRC Prelude-GT made it four wins in a row. Team Kunimitsu's Tadasuke Makino and Naoki Yamamoto came from 13th in class at the halfway point, used the second safety car and a short fuel stop to jump into the lead, and won — closing to just three points behind the TOM'S Toyota pair of Sho Tsuboi and Kenta Yamashita with only next month's Motegi double-header left in the season. The pole-sitting Nakajima Honda, meanwhile, finished 12th. Autopolis did not respect qualifying order in either class.
Why road-car fans should care about this BRZ
The R&D Sport BRZ is not a silhouette racer with a BRZ badge glued on for marketing — it is Subaru's long-running factory GT300 program, built around a flat-six engine in a car that shares its basic shape and spirit with the BRZ and GR86 in your garage. That is also why its weekends matter to the road-car world: this is the program that keeps Subaru's rear-drive sports car honest as a racing machine while the road cars carry the same name. A record 18th pole for Yamauchi says the car is still, on a single lap, the class benchmark. Sunday says the team still has a race-distance problem to solve before Motegi.
Motegi's double-header finale is next month, and both championships are live: three points in GT500, and a GT300 fight where the points-leading Kondo Nissan also had its Autopolis strategy ruined by the same second safety car. If Autopolis proved anything, it is that nobody — not the pole sitter, not the points leader — gets to coast into that finale.