The second round of this year’s Asian Le Mans Series will be run this weekend at Fuji International Speedway in Japan, with a slightly reduced entry compared to the opening race, two weeks ago.
There will be 20 cars entered, which is seven less than Shanghai.
Four of these cars are Porsche Carrera Cup Asia cars, which won’t go to the Japan trip.
We have also lost all three Jackie Chan DC Racing cars from the field. There season opener went all terrible, where #1 with the three Malaysian drivers lost the rear wheel after just over one hour of race. That was the 2017/18 LMP2 Champion car out of the race. #38 in the LMP3 category didn’t have the speed at all, and finished all the way down in 9th in class. To be fair, they did have some technical issues with the car too, which in total ended up costing them 14 laps to the winning car.
It went even worse for #37, which was disqualified, since Yoshiharu Mori had been put on the entry list prior to the weekend, but never actually made it into the car, since the payment from him never arrived. The ACO rules are very strict, so all drivers on the entry list absolutely has to be in the car, and do the minimum time, if the car crosses the finishing line. And Mori didn’t do so, so that disqualified the whole car.
That left the Jackie Chan DC Racing with only minimal chances of winning any of the 2018/19 Championship, and all the problems made them skip the Japan trip. And therefore all championship hopes are totally gone now.
Thankfully we still have 7 LMP2 cars, 8 LMP3 cars and 5 GT cars in the field.
Both race and qualifying can be followed via live streaming on YouTube. The qualifying will run on Saturday morning from 06.00 CET, while the race will be streamed Sunday morning from 03.30 CET.
