A Champion's Guide To Super GT

After his Formula 1 career fizzled out, Heikki Kovalainen found a new lease of life in Super GT with Lexus. He talks through the finer points of one of the world’s hardest racing categories.

Heikki Kovalainen didn’t want his Formula 1 career to end after 111 grands prix. But a two-race, pointless swansong in late 2013 with Lotus after the rest of the year had been spent on the sidelines was no precursor to a full-time comeback. Instead, it led to one year out of racing entirely.

That downtime was not wasted. Kovalainen engineered a switch from grand prix to grand touring – a 2014 Super GT test led to a race drive for ’15, at Lexus with Team SARD. But his debut season was disappointing. “It was quite a difficult step, probably more difficult than I anticipated,” he says. “The first year that I went over there I thought we would quite quickly pick up the pace to a level where we could start racing near the front. It took for me a good six months to really get up to speed.”

After ending his first season 13th in the points, the 2008 Hungarian GP winner turned it around in style to seal the ’16 Super GT crown with Kohei Hirate at the very last round.

So what makes the Japanese category one of the world’s toughest, and most under-appreciated, disciplines? EDD STRAW

HEIKKI KOVALAINEN ON…

…the tyre war