Few racing observers outside of Japan are unlikely to be too familiar with newly-crowned Super GT champion Kazuki Hiramine. JamieKlein_ digs into the Nissan driver's remarkable journey to becoming a staple of its title-winning lineup 📝
It’s hard to think of a recent Super GT champion who has taken such an unlikely path to the top as Kazuki Hiramine, who alongside team-mate Bertrand Baguette ended a 27-year title drought for Team Impul this year.
This is where Hiramine’s path diverges considerably from most of the other drivers on the grid that season, including future Super Formula champion Tomoki Nojiri and Toyota staples Ryo Hirakawa and Yuichi Nakayama. Hiramine was drafted in to join Tracy Sports for the final round of the Super Taikyu season at Autopolis, driving a Honda S2000 in the ST-4 class.
But it was 2016, when he was recruited to join Kondo Racing’s team in the top ST-X class of Super Taikyu and won the championship at the first time of asking, that really put him on the path to his current Nissan GT500 drive, as it made him the natural candidate to spearhead Kondo’s line-up when it joined Super GT’s GT300 class in 2019.
“After that, they told me I would drive for Team Impul. My reaction was like, ‘Are you sure you mean me? Really?’ I knew James was super-fast and famous, not just in Japan but all over the world. I was so happy.” “He’s a hard worker, he really surprised me with that. He looks at a lot of data and on-board videos, he works a lot with the engineers. He is never afraid to do extra hours on the simulator to improve himself and the car. That’s maybe his main characteristic.”
“Straight away we were talking a lot, sharing information about lines, what gears to use, all the information we could find,” he says. “We never hide anything from each other. Even outside the track we talked a lot, nearly every day.
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