Nissan’s Super GT drivers will turn their attention to the 2018 NISMO Festivalafter completing the final round of the 2018 Super GT Championship at Twin Ring Motegi.
The leading Super GT stars and cars will join an amazing collecting of Nissan race cars from the past and present at Fuji International Speedway for the 21st annual NISMO Festival on December 2. Nissan’s Formula E car will also make its debut on home soil in Japan.
Tsugio Matsuda and Ronnie Quintarelli led the way for Nissan in the final Super GT round with a seventh-place finish in the shortest race of the year – 250km.
Quintarelli took the opening stint and pitted early on lap 20 to hand over to Tsugio Matsuda. The Japanese driver’s long 35-lap stint was disrupted by a spinning Honda with six laps to go, and he briefly lost a position to the No. 12 Nissan GT-R NISMO GT500 of Daiki Sasaki.
Three Nissan’s eventually filled the top 10 with Matsuda and Quintarelli in seventh – and Satoshi Motoyama and Katsumasa Chiyo in ninth plus JP de Oliveira and Mitsunori Takaboshi 10th.
The Jann Mardenborough/Daiki Sasaki entry was running in eighth place in the closing stages, but in the final lap, Sasaki found himself on its last drops of fuel. This caused him to fall back down to 11th place.
Nissan already has its sights on bouncing back in 2019 after recording a single victory at Fuji in 2018.
“We were able to take victory in round two of this year, but from around summer all our rivals became faster making it a rough season,” said Quintarelli. “There are numerous areas we need to look over and we’re already talking to the engineers about these issues. We will all work hard together to make next year Nissan’s year.”
SOURCE: Nissan
