Hiroaki Ishiura and Yuji Tachikawa were unable to qualify for Sunday's third round of the 2022 season following an engine failure at the end of Saturday morning's practice session, leaving them 15th and last on the grid.
Tachikawa only made it as far as lap 11 before another blow-up befell the luckless #38 Cerumo crew, which has now gone three years without a win.
With the GT500 regulations only allowing the use of two engines per season, the quickfire loss of two units at Suzuka means Cerumo will have to take a third engine from the next race at Fuji in early August.
That means Ishiura and Tachikawa are set to have to serve a five-second stop-and-go penalty during the race.
Cerumo team director Kotaro Tanaka revealed that while the team could have attempted to qualify, they chose to err on the side of caution.
"The engine replacement was just about completed in time for qualifying, but the sensor harness was broken because of the heat, so instead of doing a rush job, we gave up running in qualifying and fixed it properly," explained Tanaka, speaking to Motorsport.com's Japanese edition.
Cerumo was one of three Toyota teams that took a penalty for an authorised engine change in last year's Autopolis race, along with the #14 Rookie Racing squad and the #37 TOM'S team.
However, Ishiura and Tachikawa were able to recover from that setback to come second, and Tanaka is hoping for a repeat performance at Fuji.
"We’ll have a penalty, so it might be logical to think we have no chance, but last year at Autopolis we had a penalty and we still finished second," said Tanaka. "So I think it could happen again."
