Autopolis Qualifying Moved to Sunday Amid Bad Weather

Qualifying for SUPER GT’s sixth round of the season at Autopolis has been moved to Sunday morning with persistent bad weather leading to the cancellation of the entire Saturday program at the Kyushu circuit.

After the morning’s practice session was cancelled after a series of delays due to a combination of rain and fog, qualifying, which had been scheduled for 2:40 p.m. local time, suffered the same fate due to standing water and the threat of lightning.

All track action for support series Japanese Formula 4 was also cancelled.

SUPER GT qualifying is now set to take place at 8 a.m. local time (Saturday 7 p.m. EDT), with both the GT300 and GT500 classes set to take to the track for a single 30-minute session each to decide the grid.

The cancellation of practice had already led to the decision to change qualifying to this format, albeit with 40 minutes of running per class instead of 30, before the decision to postpone it until Sunday morning.

Warm-up will take place at 11:30 a.m. (Saturday 10:30 p.m. EDT), having been extended to 40 minutes, while the three-hour race is now due to commence at 1:20 p.m. (12:20 a.m. EDT), 20 minutes later than previously scheduled.

The Japanese F4 schedule has been cut to a single race, which will take place between SUPER GT qualifying and warm-up.

It marks the second SUPER GT round in a row that qualifying has been unable to take place as normal on Saturday due to bad weather.

However, at the previous round at Sugo, practice was run on Saturday and enough laps were completed to use the session results to determine the grid for the race.