After two seasons as a ‘super-sub’ in the Honda Super Formula stable, 2022 was supposed to mark the year that Sasahara became part of the furniture at the Sakura brand. Handed the chance to join Tomoki Nojiri at Team Mugen, Sasahara finally had the platform he had so desperately craved to prove himself.
Sasahara kept up his part of the bargain, winning two races (matching Nojiri’s tally) on his way to sixth overall and helping Mugen to a comfortable teams’ championship crown. But when it came to contract renewal time, the best Honda was prepared to offer was a berth at B-Max Racing.
It was against this backdrop that overtures were made to Toyota, which was puzzling over how to replace Formula E-bound Sacha Fenestraz in SUPER GT. At the same time, Giuliano Alesi’s poor performances for TOM’S in Super Formula made it logical for the team to evaluate a driver few would have imagined being available just weeks earlier in the post-season Suzuka test.
In the end, Alesi kept hold of his Super Formula seat, a decision that TOM’S openly admits was made with factors other than pure performance in mind. But, in a twist of irony, Sasahara will partner the French driver this year in SUPER GT in a new-look #37 Toyota GR Supra.
After making his Supra debut at Motegi in December, Sasahara has been in action for pre-season tests with TOM’S at Okayama, Suzuka, back to Okayama and most recently Fuji as he gets to grips with not only a new manufacturer and car, but also Bridgestone tyres after two seasons on Dunlop rubber at the Mugen Honda squad.
“It’s a completely different style, in terms of the way of working with each other and developing the car,” he says. “Both manufacturers have their good and bad points, but so far I am really enjoying working with the Toyota guys and TOM’S.”
It would be fair to say that Sasahara and Alesi haven’t lit up the timesheets in testing this winter, although the #37 car held its own against the other members of the Toyota stable last month at Fuji, where the terrible weather obscured the true competitive order to a degree.
But with Sasahara still getting up to speed in his new surroundings, and Alesi as well as chief engineer Kenta Odachi still lacking experience in GT500, some growing pains for the distinctive black-and-lime green Deloitte-branded machine are only to be expected.
“At Okayama we tried a lot of different things,” says Sasahara. “After the test, my brain was completely gone with the amount of data we had to analyse!
“We were not really there on pace. But we knew that because we tried a lot of things, and I think if we go back to a base set-up and same tyres, I think we can more or less match car #36, so I am not too concerned about it.
“The first round will be difficult, but from the #37 side, we are not pushing too much for the first round. It’s a long season and we want to do better every race.
“It’s my first year with this package and with Giuliano, so we take it race-by-race and we will try and improve. How Toyota is able to improve with the carbon-neutral fuel will also make a big difference, so I trust them to push hard on that side.”
While Sasahara has been mostly focused on SUPER GT in recent months, it’s impossible to get away from the fact that his heart still lies in Super Formula.
In fact, he’s already had two outings in the brand-new SF23 so far this year. The first of these came at Motegi in his first assignment as the new development driver for Toyota, while the second was in this month’s sole pre-season test at Suzuka, where he was called up at the last minute to stand in for an injured Kenta Yamashita at Kondo Racing.
On that occasion, he set the 11th-fastest time of the test, outpacing Kondo new boy and reigning Super Formula Lights champion Kazuto Kotaka, although he is convinced he could have gone much quicker at the end of the test with a more qualifying-focused set-up.
“They told me, ‘ok, you are going to replace Kenta for testing’ and I had to get ready,” Sasahara recalls. “I had no time to make a new seat, I just had to use last year’s seat.
“The Motegi test was a wet test, so it was more like a physical warm-up for me! But in the test at Suzuka the car felt ok. I think we could have been P2, P3 at the end of the second day, but we tried a lot of different things, some of which worked and some didn’t work.”
On whether he feels he has a good chance of returning to Super Formula in 2024, Sasahara laughs: “One positive is that now I have a lot of experience of different teams’ cars - Dandelion, Mugen, Kondo, TOM’S, so if a team wants to use my information…”
For now though, with Yamashita fully recovered and ready to take up his seat for the Super Formula opener at Fuji, Sasahara is ready to give SUPER GT his undivided attention.
And while the 26-year-old is savvy enough to realise that he and Alesi are realistically unlikely to contend for the title right away, he is eyeing a first victory as a Toyota driver.
“On my side, I still need to learn more about the Supra and Bridgestone tyres,” he admits. “I’m not sure that we can fight for the championship because the Honda and Nissan look strong and the Supra is struggling a bit more than the others.
“For the first round I would be happy if we are around the top eight, and then get better every race. Giuliano is getting better and better, he’s got more experience of the Japanese racing environment now.
“Also we have a lot of 450km races this year, which lets you make more difference with the strategy, and having fewer sets of tyres can also help us if we can make the right choice [with tyre selection]. At least I want to win one race this season.”
