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.