Fuji Saturday Notebook

***Cadillac scored its fourth FIA World Endurance Championship pole position courtesy of Alex Lynn’s Hyperpole-topping effort on Saturday at Fuji aboard the No. 12 V-Series.R, as well as its third of the season. Lynn meanwhile becomes a four-time pole-sitter, putting him even with Loic Duval, Jose Maria Lopez, Romain Dumas and Antonio Fuoco.

***Lynn, who scored back-to-back Fuji poles, commented: “Yesterday I didn’t have a good feeling with the car. I thought a couple of other brands looked very fast, and I think we had to revert a little bit to a car that we knew for qualifying. I think we’ve made really big steps to the car in the race, but we went back to our Sao Paulo-type car for qualifying. This morning in FP3 I had a much better feeling and confidence.”

***Pole position for Racing Spirit of Leman’s Eduardo Barrichello LMGT3 means Aston Martin has now scored a total of 70 WEC pole positions across all classes, of which four have come in LMGT3. It marks the team’s second pole in two races after Barrichello’s pole on home turf in Sao Paulo, with the son of ex-Formula 1 racer Rubens becoming only the second repeat polesitter in LMGT3 history after Sarah Bovy.

***Mikkel Jensen, who qualified the best of the Peugeot 9X8s fourth, said there was no way he could have matched Lynn’s pole-winning effort, pointing out the apparent ease with with the Cadillac is able to keep its tires in the correct operating window.

***Jensen told Sportscar365: “Our car is very hard on tires, so a perfect lap, with a perfect sector one and sector three, doesn’t exist for us. If you have the tires ready for sector one, you will lose time in sector three. My tires were not entirely ready for sector one on my best lap, but they were for sector three. The Cadillacs can do three [push] laps in a row; we can barely do one before we need a cool-down.”

***Ferrari’s Antonio Giovinazzi admitted he would have “signed” for his sixth position on the grid in the points-leading No. 51 499P ahead of qualifying. “The goal in the race is to stay where we are and score points,” the Italian said. “Our pace is not that bad, but to overtake will be really difficult. I don’t know where we can try to overtake.”

***Toyota Gazoo Racing Europe technical director David Floury expressed satisfaction with Ryo Hirakawa qualifying eighth aboard the best of the GR010 Hybrids considering the Japanese marque’s Balance of Performance. “Our references are Porsche and Ferrari, and we are all close together,” Floury told reporters. “I think so far we are having a better weekend than we had in COTA. We didn’t have a good FP1 but we worked to get better.”

***Hirakawa described his first qualifying effort, which put the No. 8 Toyota fifth, as close to optimal, but admitted that he lost “maybe a tenth” with a mistake on his Hyperpole run. The Japanese driver added: “The gap to pole was huge, more than we expected, but [eighth] was more or less where we thought we would be.”

***Floury added that he expects a challenging race for Toyota based on the car’s lack of straight line performance compared to some of its competitors. He said: “It has been the same picture for the last two years with the weight and power we are running. Any competitor can get in your tow right from the start of the straight. The only mini-sector where there are only corners, Turns 3, 4 and 5, we are quite competitive, but for the rest of the track, as soon as we have acceleration, we cannot fight.”

***The day’s on-track action began with a 12-minute ‘Circuit Safari’ (pictured top), which featured a bus powered by hydrogen, as well as a hydrogen-powered Toyota Crown road car that was driven by ACO President Pierre Fillon.

***A press conference was held on Saturday featuring Fillon, Toyota Gazoo Racing Europe vice-chairman Kazuki Nakajima and MissionH24 technical director Bassel Aslan, in which further details were revealed about the timeline for the development of the hydrogen fuel cell-powered H24EVO prototype that is being jointly developed by MissionH24 and Toyota as per the agreement revealed earlier in the year at Le Mans.

***Having leveraged Toyota’s expertise in aerodynamics and cooling to discover new avenues for development, Aslan clarified that the design of the car’s powertrain, survival cell and hydrogen tank compartment will be frozen by the end of November 2025, the bodywork will be frozen by February 2026, and that wind tunnel testing will take place by the end of 2026 with the target of a first on-track test shortly after. Aslan also suggested that the car could take part in a race by the end of 2027 if all goes well.

***During the press conference, Fillon reiterated the ACO’s current target date of 2028 for hydrogen-powered cars to make their debut in the WEC and the 24 Hours of Le Mans remains in place, and said technical regulations will be published early next year.

***Mathieu Jaminet expressed surprise at his last-minute callup to replace Michael Christensen in the No. 5 Porsche 963 at Fuji this weekend, in what marks his first race on Japanese soil since the 2019 Suzuka 10 Hours. “It was surprising, but I guess it means they have a lot of belief and faith in me, so I must be doing something right!” he told Sportscar365. “Even though I don’t know the track, they trust I can do the job.”

***On his first impressions of Fuji, Jaminet said: “It’s very nice. It has a different flow to anywhere else, especially the last sector. It is very challenging with these cars, without ABS, and the track is so wide in places, with many choices of different lines. It’s kind of weird because at most tracks there are only one or two lines, but here it feels you can do ten different things and it somehow works!”

***It was announced on Friday that Alpine driver Mick Schumacher will test an Indy car for Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing on Oct. 13 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course. It comes amid intense speculation regarding Schumacher’s future, with the German ex-Formula 1 driver looking increasingly likely to part ways with Alpine.

***Saturday’s qualifying session marked the first of the season outside Le Mans in which Schumacher was not responsible for qualifying the No. 36 Alpine A424, with Frederic Makowiecki — a former SUPER GT winner at Fuji — taking on those duties.

***McLaren Japan held a talk show at the Fuji Speedway Hotel on Saturday morning featuring United Autosports LMGT3 driver Marino Sato and his compatriot Masanori Sekiya, whose victory in the 1995 24 Hours of Le Mans came at the wheel of a McLaren F1 GTR. Comparisons were drawn between Sato’s victory in a rain-impacted Circuit of The Americas race earlier this month and Sekiya’s triumph alongside JJ Lehto and Yannick Dalmas, which famously came in adverse conditions.

***United Autosports team co-owner Richard Dean declined to comment when asked by Sportscar365 about the prospect of McLaren’s service provider for its LMGT3 effort changing next year. Garage 59, best known for its GT World Challenge Europe powered by AWS exploits in recent years, has been tipped to take over the program for 2026.

***Former 24 Hours of Le Mans GT2 class winner Leo Hindery passed away last week at the age of 77. Hindery, the founding chairman and CEO of The YES Network, the regional television home of the New York Yankees, was a regular in the American Le Mans Series and scored a runner-up class finish at Le Mans in 2003 with co-drivers Marc Lieb and Peter Baron before winning the race in class two years later, alongside Lieb and Mike Rockenfeller in an Alex Job Racing/BAM! Motorsport-entered Porsche 911 GT3 RSR.

***The 6 Hours of Fuji is due to begin on Sunday at 11 a.m. local time (Saturday 10 p.m. EDT). Coverage will be carried live in the U.S. on HBO Max as well as on the official FIA WEC TV website. Click Here for full global broadcast and streaming details.

***Regular WEC commentators Martin Haven and Graham Goodwin are joined in the booth this weekend by Darren Turner, who fills in for an absent Anthony Davidson. Shea Adam continues as a pit lane reporter for a second race alongside the returning Bruce Jouanny. Jonny Palmer and Bruce Jones will call the action for Radio Le Mans.

John Dagys and Davey Euwema contributed to this report