3 Hours of Fuji – Free Practice 1

Fuji Speedway officially welcomed all Asian Le Mans Series teams onto the track for the first Free Practice session of the 2013 3 Hours of Fuji. All but one of the teams took park in the hour long session under the midday sun, as they navigated their way around the 4.563 km circuit.

With some teams very familiar with the track, especially the SUPER GT entries, and some with little experience here, all drivers benefited from the valuable track time ahead of Sunday’s race.

China’s KCMG followed up their win at 3 Hours of Inje with a very strong first Free Practice at 3 Hours of Fuji finishing top of LM P2 (P1 overall) with a fastest lap-time of 1’33.917 set by Richard Bradley in their #18 Morgan-Nissan.

#007 Craft Racing AMR Aston Martin Vantage GT3: Frank Yu, Keita Sawa, Stefan Mücke

Photo by: Asian Le Mans Series

The top SUPER GT team (P3 overall) was R&D SPORT with a fastest lap time of 1’39.049 in their #61 Subaru BRZ GT3, set by Tetsuya Yamano. All the SUPER GT entries were very closely matched, finishing within 1.9 seconds of each other.

Italy's AF Corse were the top GTC team (P9 overall) with a fastest lap time of 1’40.725 in their #77 Ferrari 458 GT3, set by Andrea Bertolini. Not far behind them in GTC was Craft Racing (P13 overall) with a quickest time of 1’41.105 in their #007 Aston Martin Vantage GT3 by Richard Lyons, showing that the fierce GTC battle from Inje will continue in Fuji too.

Top of GTE was Taisan Ken Endless (P17 overall) who clocked a fastest time of 1’42.989 with their #70 Ferrari 458 GTE, set by Shinji Nakano.

With the prototypes and GT + GT300 cars all very close again teams will be looking to utilise tomorrow’s Free Practice 2 (10:15 JST) ahead of tomorrow's Qualifying (13:55 JST) for Sunday’s race. With a very strong entry-list and a closely contested first Free Practice session the 2013 3 Hours of Fuji is set to be another historic race for endurance racing in Asia.

Asian Le Mans Series