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Inside the RE Amemiya camp. Amemiya-san is sitting by the tires. |
The RE Amemiya RX-7 takes out the Castrol Supra on the back turn. |
Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? |
Amemiya-san entertains his legion of fans long after qualifying is over. And to the right: Bomex ground effects, even nice in white. |
Believe it or not, TRD has these MR-2 Spyders breaking off 300 hp. |
RE Amemiya driver Haruhiko Matsumoto gives his prediction for the race. |
Bomex drivers Hiroshi Sasaki (seated center) and Mamour Suzuki (right) relax during Saturday qualifying. |
The RE Amemiya is among the three in the winners circle, and the team drivers, Haruhiko Matsumoto and Tetsuya Yamano, celebrate their Third place finish in style (below). |
After eight hours in the sun, these ice things start to look pretty good. And below (from left to right): the popular Raybrig NSX and the Castrol Supra. |
Saturday's qualifying session has ended and the once crowded Fuji International Speedway is empty. It will be bursting again by tomorrow afternoon, but right now pit lane is closed for the evening and deserted. The sky is the color of worn jeans and deepening. But there is something going on at the RE Amemiya garage. A legion of young fans is crowding around the yellow RX-7 GT300 race car. And judging by the preference for dyed shag cuts and bright primary-colored backpacks, none of them seem to be over the age of 30.
Team RE Amemiya gets its name from the legend who owns it (the "RE" stands for "rotary engine"). And Amemiya-san is easy to spot. He has a round face that's all cheeks and nose. He has a gray mustache but dark hair spread around his crown in a '70s-ish semi-fro. He is ready-made for a cartoon. And in Japanese street culture, the man is revered like an idol. Right now, he is standing in front of everyone with a bullhorn and shouting things in Japanese. The crowd pumps fists into the air after each phrase. I cannot begin to understand this game or this relationship between race team owner and his supporters. I don't even chalk this up to the uniqueness of Japanese pop culture. It is strictly Amemiya.
Sunday is even hotter than Saturday; mid-90s easy, and the damp air feels like wet gloves. The All-Japan Grand Touring Championships is set at Fuji International Speedway. It lies somewhere at the base of Mt. Fuji, which is a two-hour drive roughly due west of Tokyo. During the winter, the summit is capped with white snow, and Fuji (it's a volcano, I've learned, but let's forget about that while I'm here) transforms into the quintessential postcard mountain. But during the summer, it just absorbs the sun and becomes a giant heat chamber.
Although I do have an all-access photo pass for the race, I spend most of my time away from pit row and the RE Amemiya garage due to my constant fear of things going wildly awry and turning into a Jerry Lewis farce. I have nightmares of flying hoses and tripping over fuel cans and somehow incapacitating the star driver before, unknowingly, landing behind the wheel on the grid and finishing the race in reverse. And so I spend most of my time traipsing back and forth through the paddock area.
The All-Japan Grand Touring Championships is the pinnacle of the GT race schedule. But walking through the paddock area, I get a strong sense that the racing bit plays second fiddle to the models. Each team has a squad of at least two models. The models are Japanese and beautiful and pure-looking, like innocence personified. And obviously, it's impossible to talk about them without feeling like some sort of perverted French poet. The models are universally dressed in short skirts and revealing tops, and there's something extremely superhero-ish about the outfits (I half-expect them to fly or burn things with their eyes). And they all carry these dangerous tent-sized umbrellas. Despite these eye-gouging defense mechanisms, the models are constantly surrounded by teams of amateur shutterbugs.
The best view of the race-other than that from in front of a television (which I've determined to be the best view for any sporting event)-is from a steep lush embankment overlooking the back curves of the course. It is filled to capacity. There isn't an empty patch of grass around me. And each person is equipped with the most state-of-the-art photography equipment, I swear. This is not so much due to the Japanese taking their racing seriously as it is them taking their photography seriously. Not a single box camera in sight. Some have nuclear-proof camera cases with multiple lenses at their disposal, starting from giant zoom all the way up to bazooka length. Some carry two cameras, each one equipped with a specific-purpose lens-again, no lens smaller than my thigh. The fellow next to me brought a ladder and is snapping furiously (via turbocharged motor drive) at what sounds like ten-thousand frames per nanosecond. I feel terribly inadequate. (Camera envy?-MD)
There is some pretty good action at this part of the course. A Lamborghini crashed here earlier and a Porsche caught on fire, and a good deal of the passing happens here. Not to mention the fact that this is the only part of the course where the cars actually slow down from a blur of color to reveal discernible lines. However, I don't even try to pretend that I have any idea of who is winning the race. I don't even have a clean grasp on how the RE Amemiya RX-7 is doing. I see that it's doing its fair share of passing, but since the GT300 and the more powerful GT500 classes race together, the RX-7 is also doing an equal sharing of getting passed.
The GT300 class confines all cars to around 300 hp, among other more vague restrictions. The GT500 class bumps that limitation up to around 500 hp. I say "around" simply because no team gives me a straight answer when I ask them how much horsepower its car is running. They also deflect the answer by accusing the other teams of packing much more than the rules allow. By adapting Adam Smith's theory of the invisible hand to racing, I can only assume that fair play is ensured simply because all the teams are cheating by equal amounts.
Among RE Amemiya's fellow GT300 competitors are a Ferrari F355, a number of Porsche 911s, a couple of MR2 Spyders, and an AE86 Corolla (which I am told is only an AE86 on the surface). Most of the NSXs are in the GT500 class with the Supras and Skylines, where most of the superstar drivers of the GT circuit compete. Visibly, the most popular team is the Raybrig NSX. Most of the grandstand is flying the violet and gray of Raybrig flags and towels, in the same manner as the tifosi of Ferrari. The big difference here is that the Japanese fans aren't vocal at all in their rooting. Oh, they flag-wave all right, but there are no chants, no songs. I think they're just too involved in their photo-taking to root.
The race cars that make up the two classes are based on real production vehicles, but only in the most general sense of shape. The sound that these race cars make is otherworldly. At idle, the engines resonate with a deep repetitious blat-blat-blat. They don't sound like they've been "built up" as much as they have been destroyed, like they've been tossed through the business end of a trash compactor and nothing fits quite right anymore. They sound like cars built by giants in fits of anger. The Porsches and Supras share a similar deep, throaty chortle as they pass, while the NSXs universally produce a sharp chord that spans the full tonal range. The Mazda RX-7 of RE Amemiya gives off a high-pitched shriek as it passes. On the straights, it dopplers like a fighter jet. When the drivers downshift on the curves, the cars backfire like cannons. And I half-expect some of them to spontaneously combust.
Walking back to the paddocks, I notice that there are just as many people not watching the race as there are in the grandstand and along the back curves. Most of them look like burnt out (or sunburnt) amateur shutterbugs unprepared for the heat. They all have towels over their necks, like prize-fighters, and this desperate "When will it end?" look on their faces. You can tell that their minds are battling the internal dilemma of the genuine race fan: the once-a-year event enthusiasm versus enough already. I can't say that I blame them. There just isn&'t any shade around this track. No trees or foliage, which is ironic because the rest of the mountain is covered in it. As for myself, I've been downing one can of iced oolong tea per hour just to keep up with the amount of sweat flooding from my pores.
With the race winding down, I head back to the RE Amemiya garage to watch the final laps on the monitors. Apparently, the RE Amemiya RX-7 is doing quite well and will finish in Third, behind the heavily-funded Taisan Porsche 911 (the team owns four Porsche GT3s I'm told, one of which won its class in Le Mans this year). Unfortunately, too many yellow flags prevented the team from pulling up in the ranks early in the race.
After the trophy presentation, I get my first chance to speak to Amemiya-san and his two drivers, Tetsuya Yamano and Haruhiko Matsumoto. As of press time, they are tied for Second in the championship points race, but Amemiya-san goes out of his way to express that winning is only one part of his goal. "You have to entertain the customers," he says through a translator. "Because if you don't, there will be no more customers. Good racers understand who the real customers are, and they aren't the racers." And for Amemiya-san, hanging out late on Saturday after everyone else is gone is all part of the deal.