Maiden win for Takuro Shinohara and Audi

From the beginning of the season, Takuro Shinohara had been one of the fastest contenders in TCR Japan. Finally, after a series of unfortunate circumstances in the previous events, he claimed his maiden win in Okayama’s first race. It was also the first victory for Audi that became the fourth brand to win a race after Honda, Volkswagen and Alfa Romeo.
After setting the fastest times in all the three Free Practice sessions and the Qualifying, Shinohara made good use of the pole position and took the lead. Shuji Maejima, who sat alongside him on the front row, made a poor start, which gave the opportunity to Yu Kanamaru to move from P5 on the grid into second; Maejima, Matthew Howson and Shogo Mitsuyama entered abreast into T1, they clashed and Howson spun off.
Maejima then overtook Kanamaru for second, but he had to serve a drive through for the incident and dropped at the back, behind Howson. Later on Mitsuyama too was given a drive through for the collision after the start.
Shinohara pulled away, while Kanamru retained the second position after rejecting the assaults from ‘Hirobon’. Eventually, the latter lost the third position to Takeshi Matsumoto who completed the podium behind Shinohara and Kanamaru. Howson and Maejima managed to recover to seventh and eighth.
In the standings, Kanamaru is still leading by twelve points over Matsumoto; Mitsuyama lies in third position 24 points behind and is closely followed by Shinohara and Howson who are one and five points adrift respectively.
Action will resume Sunday at 08:30 local time (03:10 CET) with the Qualifying session for Race 2 that will start at 13:35 local time (06:35 CET) and will be streamed live at www.tcr-series.com and www.tcr-series.tv.

Race 1
1. Takuro Shinohara (Hitotsuyama Racing, Audi RS 3 LMS), 15 laps
2. Yu Kanamaru (Team Goh Models, Honda Civic FK7), 8.966
3. Takeshi Matsumoto (RT Team Wakayama, Volkswagen Golf GTI), 10.773
4. ‘Hirobon’ (Birth Racing Project, Volkswagen Golf GTI), 16.384
5. Yukinori Taniguchi (KCMG, Honda Civic FK7), 20.664

Championship points
1. Kanamaru 123 pts; 2. Matsumoto 111; 3. Mitsuyama 99