Toyota has taken the win in the third and final online round of the season, to tie with Subaru at the top of the Gran Turismo World Series rankings heading into the World Final.
The defending, 2021 Manufacturer Series champion joins 2020 champion Subaru at the head of the table on ten points as it’s hit a rich vein of late-season form.
Although the team, courtesy of Igor Fraga, had taken pole position at all three previous events — two online races and the live Showdown — it hadn’t converted any to victory until September’s Round 2 at Spa, allowing Subaru to race into a three-point lead courtesy of wins at Watkins Glen and Trial Mountain.
Substitute driver Ryota Kokubun, himself a two-time World Tour winner, couldn’t make it four poles from four though at Deep Forest, with Seiya Suzuki taking a slightly surprising first place in qualifying in the Volkswagen.
Of the championship contenders, Toyota would be third, behind Lucas Bonelli in the Mercedes-AMG, while Subaru’s poor qualifying form continued as Kylian Drumont was 11th of the 11 cars — with Jaguar unable to race — with a 0.945s deficit to Volkswagen.
After Fraga’s success running the Soft tire for the opening stint at Spa, three of the front four opted for the same strategy. Only Kokubun in the Toyota selected the harder Medium option, along with the cars from fifth backwards.
That tire mix soon worked itself out, with Mehdi Hafidi sending the Nissan GT-R past Kokubun to put all three soft-runners at the front.
However the action behind was grabbing more screen time as, in the first major incident of the race, Nations Cup Round 2 winner Angel Inostroza overcooked the Porsche’s braking for the new hairpin and speared into Giorgio Mangano in the Mazda. The Chilean picked up a warning for the collision.
Mangano found himself being bumped out again in the same place on the following lap, this time by Adriano Carrazza in the Chevrolet — although this wasn’t investigated — which seemed to light the blue touchpaper.
Next time around Mangano steamed into the hairpin, collecting both Carrazza and Inostroza — and a warning from the stewards. Between the two incidents Arthur Mosso threw away his good qualifying position in the Mitsubishi by crashing on approach to the first turn, while Mangano’s race would effectively end in the wall after a side-by-side battle with Nicolas Romero’s Genesis through the esses.
With all that kicking off behind, the front three dived in for fresh tires — Bonelli and Hafidi at the end of lap six, and Suzuki on the following lap. That put Kokubun into the lead temporarily, until he also pitted the Toyota at the end of lap nine for soft tires.
Kokubun re-emerged in fourth, with a four-second deficit to the front three and softer tires. As the front-runners battled, that gap rapidly vanished, bringing the Toyota back into the top three at the expense of the Nissan with just over four laps remaining.
Suzuki couldn’t hold out much longer, with Kokubun overtaking into the final hairpin on the antepenultimate lap, and Bonelli was a sitting duck on the main straight as the Toyota hit the front on merit for the first time.
Although Suzuki and Bonelli had an entertaining battle over the remaining distance, neither could do anything to prevent Kokubun taking a second successive win for Toyota. Bonelli would just keep the Mercedes second, with Volkswagen scoring a point for the second time this season.
The result means that there’s a tie at the top of the table, with Subaru and Toyota head into the World Final in November as joint-championship leaders on ten points.
Mercedes-AMG overtakes Mazda again to hold onto third by itself, with Nissan remaining on three and Volkswagen joining Genesis on two. All other brands have yet to score or qualify.
- Subaru – 10 points
- Toyota – 10 points
- Mercedes-AMG – 7 points
- Mazda – 5 points
- Nissan – 3 points
- Genesis – 2 points
- Volkswagen – 2 points
That concludes all of the Manufacturers Cup racing action in the regular season, with only the World Final remaining. The brands all carry their World Series points totals into the Final where, we believe, 60 more points will be available — thus any one of the 12 qualified brands can take the title.
One final event remains before then, with the third and final online round of the Nations Cup coming on Sunday November 13. The World Final is scheduled for November 25-27.
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