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F-Nippon / Super GT News
FN News - Lotterer Takes His First Win At Fuji
26/08/2007
The sixth round of the all- Japanese Formula Nippon championship took place at Fuji Speed Way in front of a capacity 21,900 crowd. Andre Lotterer’s Tom’s Team car started from third and after seeing off Loic Duval of Nakajima Racing and Tatsuya Kataoka of Team Le Mans, went on to claim his first victory of the season.
Satoshi Motoyama was in good shape during testing on Friday and took pole position, his first since October 2005. Takashi Kogure took second spot, followed by points leader Tsugio Matsuda. However, Matsuda was penalised and dropped to tenth on the grid after his car was competed in the morning’s free practice on non-marked tyres.
Kogure failed to start after a clutch problem, not helped when Michael Krumm crushed into his car on the grid. Motoyama took the lead, with Lotterer and Duval in hot pursuit, running for five laps under the safety car until the grid crash was cleared. Lotterer passed Motoyama just after the safety car was called out but Duval, running a low-fuel strategy, lead the pack. Lotterer then pitted and rejoined the track ahead of Duval and passed Kataoka who had opted for an early pit-stop with 12 laps to go.
“I made a mistake in qualifying, but I was confident of doing well in the race. Our team strategy was perfect and our tyres performed very well. I’m so happy – I’m close to Matsuda in the championship and I will be keep pushing hard,” said Lotterer
“The tyre performance for all the cars was very good, helped by the lower track temperatures,” said Bridgestone’s senior technical adviser Yasuo Teranishi. “It was a very interesting race and I was pleased with the performance of our tyres!”
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