Super Formula fans were treated to their best title battle in years after some one-sided contests in 2021 and ’22, and while SUPER GT had a more turbulent year filled with red flags and incidents, the series still produced a championship battle that went down to the wire. This year’s Top 10 features six of last year’s list, plus two newcomers and another two returning from previous years. Read on to see who makes the grade.
Honourable mentions
In both Super Formula and SUPER GT, Toshiki Oyu was entertaining and frustrating to watch in equal measure. There’s no doubting his raw speed, as evidenced by two pole positions for the reborn TGM team in Super Formula and some eye-catching drives at the wheel of the #8 ARTA Honda in SUPER GT. But there were far too many occasions on which his whole weekend would be ruined by a needless error – his almost unforgivable practice foul-up at Autopolis was what ultimately cost him a place on this top 10 list.
Elsewhere at Honda, B-Max driver Nobuharu Matsushita reminded everyone of his quality when he had a new chassis for the final Super Formula round at Suzuka. Combined with some strong showings in the Real Racing NSX-GT, it leaves you wondering why he has no seat in Super Formula 2024. On the other hand, Hiroki Otsu entered the frame for a reprieve on the strength of some solid stand-in appearances and a mostly impressive season partnering Nirei Fukuzumi in the #16 ARTA car.
Mitsunori Takaboshi made an undeniable step forward in his second season on Michelin tyres as part of the NDDP Nissan squad, his error in the closing stages of the Motegi season finale notwithstanding. Impul man Bertrand Baguette spent the year frustrated with his team’s lack of qualifying form but was often on the move in the opening stints, and deserves credit for laying the foundations for some impressive recovery drivers from poor grid slots.
Finally, Toyota’s Kenta Yamashita continues to show hints of his potential but ultimately had an unfulfiling season in both Super Formula and SUPER GT. Armed with Sacha Fenestraz’s old engineer and chassis at Kondo Racing, ‘Yamaken’ was never able to replicate the form in the Fuji opener that saw him claim an emotional first podium in three years, while his third season with Kazuya Oshima at Rookie Racing was equally anticlimactic despite some strong stints.
10. 
7th in Super Formula / 14th in SUPER GT (with Takuya Izawa)
At first, it seemed like Super Formula Lights graduate Ota was destined to have a rookie season to forget as he replaced Hiroki Otsu at Dandelion Racing. Five races into the season and he hadn’t scored a point, not helped by missing the sole pre-season test due to an injury picked up in SUPER GT testing. But after the in-season test at Fuji, he looked like a different man, never qualifying out of the top four thereafter.
The season culminated in a memorable first win at Suzuka, making him only the fourth different driver to stand on the top step of the podium in 2023 and ending a two-year winless run for Dandelion. What was even more remarkable was that win came in the less favoured #6 car, which before Ota’s triumph hadn’t claimed a single win in the SF19/23 era.
In SUPER GT, Ota made a big impression with his feedback and his bright personality even as Nakajima Racing struggled for most of the season using Dunlop tyres. The one occasion that the #64 car was in a position to compete, Ota made the most of it, delivering a fourth-place finish that turned into second after post-race penalties were handed to two other Honda runners. A likely promotion to Real Racing for 2024 is no less than he deserves.
9. 
3rd in SUPER GT (with Tsugio Matsuda)
Despite turning 44 in June, Quintarelli shows few signs of slowing down. This was probably the Italian four-time GT500 champion’s best campaign since at least 2020, with the growing pains he and Tsugio Matsuda experienced during the first season of the Z last year seemingly expunged with a confident win in a rain-soaked Okayama opener.
Matsuda’s crash at Suzuka in hindsight probably put paid to any realistic title ambitions, costing them points not only in that race but also the following round at Fuji, where a penalty for a chassis change (plus issues getting said chassis fully sorted) left them out of the top 10. The #23 NISMO pair were also unlucky to be caught out by a new, apparently stricter skid block checking procedure at Suzuka, where they finished second and could have been much closer to the win without a fortunately-timed FCY for the #16 ARTA Honda.
In the end, Quintarelli and Matsuda arguably should have been the higher-placed of the two NISMO pairings in the standings, but had to be content with third. There’s no doubt that Quintarelli, despite being the same age as his team-mate, is the more consistent of SUPER GT’s ‘golden couple’ – but the question now is how well he can adjust to Bridgestone tyres in 2024 after more than a decade on Michelins.
8.
6th in Super Formula / 10th in SUPER GT
Now five seasons into his Super Formula career, Makino has cemented his reputation as one of Honda’s top performers, and yet that first win continues to elude him. The Dandelion man looked like he might be on the cusp of a breakthrough success at Fuji in July after scoring pole, only to be defeated in a straight fight against Liam Lawson come race day.
The big crash triggered by the Kiwi at Motegi ensured Makino wouldn’t get another fair crack of the whip, with his new chassis at Suzuka suffering from a mysterious bouncing problem. It’s through this prism that his final championship position of sixth has to be viewed; without it, he could well have been fourth, albeit a way back from the ‘big three’. That’s down to Dandelion’s struggles in the early part of the season with the SF23, but Makino earned plaudits from team boss Kiyoshi Muraoka for his role in the Kyoto squad’s turnaround.
In SUPER GT, Naoki Yamamoto’s crash at Sugo thrust Makino into the role of team leader at the Kunimitsu Honda squad. While the team’s title challenge couldn’t survive such a mortal blow, Makino impressively maintained his 100% record of making it out of Q1 and showed he has the potential to be one of the brand’s ‘A’ drivers in the near future.
7.
5th in Super Formula
In some ways, 2023 was probably the year of Hirakawa’s career so far, as he defended his World Endurance Championship title from 2022 and fulfilled his lifelong dream of driving a Formula 1 car after his surprise appointment as McLaren reserve driver. But as far as his activities in Japan (these days limited to just Super Formula) went, it was another season of disappointment, as Team Impul struggled more than most to get on top of the updated SF23 car.
As was the case with the old SF19, qualifying remained the big issue, but in race trim Hirakawa was often up there with the very best. His drive from 20th to fourth in the summer Fuji race has to rank as perhaps the drive of the season, and he was unlucky not to challenge for a win in the following race at Motegi after being delayed by an over-optimistic lunge by old title rival Naoki Yamamoto. He absolutely obliterated team-mate Yuhi Sekiguchi, whose Super Formula career looks like it won’t survive his failure to score points all year.
Hirakawa meanwhile steps away voluntarily from Super Formula in order to focus on his WEC and F1 duties in 2024. One can only hope the 29-year-old comes back to the series in future to challenge for the title his talent so deserves, having well and truly established himself as one of Japan’s premier talents of recent years.
6.
16th in Super Formula / 4th in SUPER GT (with Hiroki Otsu)
After three seasons in the shadow of Tomoki Nojiri at ARTA, Fukuzumi was promoted to ‘A’ driver status upon the team’s expansion to a second car, and he certainly made the most of the chance to shine. Two pole positions, including one taken when the #16 car was the third-heaviest in the field, were a reminder of the speed that once made Fukuzumi a genuine F1 prospect, and without some early-season penalties he and Hiroki Otsu would have been much closer to the title.
While on paper his second season at the rebranded ThreeBond squad in Super Formula wasn’t a huge improvement on his first, Fukuzumi was at least a regular visitor to Q2, failing to make the pole shootout only twice all season, and four points finishes was a new high-water mark for a one-car team that failed to score at all in 2020 and ’21, even if the off-season changes to what used to be known as Drago Corse amounted to little more than window dressing.
Fukuzumi looks set to move across to Toyota next season in what has to rank as one of the biggest driver market shocks of recent years. Exactly where he fits into Toyota’s reshuffled Super Formula roster remains to be seen, but in SUPER GT it seems he can look forward to sharing a car with Kazuya Oshima at Rookie Racing.
5.
3rd in Super Formula / 8th in SUPER GT (with Toshiki Oyu)
It took the introduction of a new (or at least, new-ish) car to finally knock Nojiri, the dominant champion of the last two years, off his perch in 2023. The shift towards oversteer with the new SF23 compared with the old SF19 was something the 34-year-old clearly found hard to master, particularly while sharing a talent with a phenomenal talent like Lawson who didn’t have to ‘unlearn’ the previous generation machine.
And yet, despite that, Nojiri still won three races, one more than he managed in 2022, and came up only 8.5 points shy of becoming the first man to earn three titles in a row since Satoru Nakajima in 1986. That was a strong recovery considering the fact he scored zero points on two occasions, one self-inflicted with his collision with Oyu at Suzuka, and the other when a collapsed lung prevented him from taking part at Autopolis, where team-mate Lawson won.
Nojiri might have featured a little higher up this list if it wasn’t for another year to forget in SUPER GT, for which he must shoulder at least some of the blame. Clearly he and Oyu didn’t gel as a duo in quite the way he and the ARTA team, now operated by Mugen, would have hoped. The good news is that the arrival of the new Civic, in which Nojiri has led development with Naoki Yamamoto sidelined by injury, promises the chance of a much-needed reset.
4.
2nd in SUPER GT (with Mitsunori Takaboshi)
As he and Mitsunori Takaboshi fell agonisingly short of the SUPER GT title for a second year in a row in the Motegi finale, it was hard not to feel sorry for Chiyo, who continued to excel in his role as the lead driver in the NDDP Racing Nissan Z. Looking back now, Nissan’s decision to drop him for 2019 seems bizarre, although a year on the sidelines certainly didn’t do his career any harm in the long run.
It can be hard to benchmark the drivers on Michelin tyres, simply because there are so few of them, but Chiyo was again more often than not the quickest man on the French rubber. Some of his qualifying performances were remarkable: fourth at Fuji when the #3 car was carrying a fuel flow restrictor, and third at Autopolis in similar circumstances. And at Motegi, finally free of handicaps but with the pressure of the title on the line, he waltzed away from the field from pole.
Nissan’s suggestions of a GT500 shake-up for 2024 raise the intriguing prospect of Chiyo having a new team-mate next season. Whether he gets a promotion to the flagship #23 NISMO car (where he would presumably partner Ronnie Quintarelli) or a new face joins him in the #3 machine, you can be sure Chiyo will remain a feature of the Nissan set-up for many years to come.
3.
4th in Super Formula / 1st in SUPER GT (with Ritomo Miyata)
After two years in the doldrums with Inging, 2023 marked a welcome return to form in Super Formula for Tsuboi, who has long been viewed as one of the most exciting talents in the Toyota stable but without the silverware to show for it. With the new SF23 helping to cure the team’s previous chronic understeer issues, Tsuboi bagged three podiums from the opening four races and it looked like he might be the third man in the title fight along with Ritomo Miyata and Liam Lawson.
And yet, when Super Formula returned to Fuji in the summer, several teams made significant step forwards and Inging went backwards. Things improved somewhat for the Suzuka finale, but by then it was too little, too late as far as the title was concerned, and Tsuboi had to be content with beating Ryo Hirakawa by a single point to unofficial ‘best of the rest’ honours in fourth overall.
It was at the wheel of a SUPER GT car that Tsuboi really shone, however, as he scored a second title in three years. After doing the lion’s share of the work at the wheel of the #36 TOM’S car for he and Miyata’s first win of the season, his Q2 effort next time out at Suzuka with 40kg of ballast on board was nothing short of remarkable, and had the race gone the full distance it’s not inconceivable that he and Miyata could have ended up winning four out of eight races. A truly great season.
2. 
2nd in Super Formula
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to say now that all the ingredients were in place for Lawson to immediately challenge for the Super Formula title. Clearly, a prodigious talent, obscured by the vagaries of Formula 2 politics, was there. He was driving for Team Mugen, the class of the field in 2021 and ’22, but in the first year of the new SF23 package, that simultaneously strengthened the squad’s position at the start of the year while knocking two-time champion Nojiri off his stride.
But that isn’t how it felt at the time to the New Zealander, who says he only realised that he might be on to something good when he did his first run in qualifying at Fuji in April, got back to the pit box and saw that his name wasn’t plummeting down the timing screens. Perhaps discarding the second race of that double-header, Lawson pretty much had the potential to win in every race after that, even if a combination of small errors and plain old bad luck swung the title away from him.
In the end though, Lawson’s destiny was never likely to be affected by whether he actually won the title, and he arrived at Suzuka having already known for some time that AlphaTauri would not have a full-time seat for him in 2024. But his presence helped to shine a much-needed spotlight on his rivals, most notably F2-bound Miyata, and has set a very high bar for his now-confirmed successor at Team Mugen, Ayumu Iwasa, as well as his former rival Theo Pourchaire in 2024.
1.
1st in Super Formula / 1st in SUPER GT (with Sho Tsuboi)
One of the pitfalls of this format is fairly judging drivers who only contest one or other of the two major championships. If this list was based on Super Formula alone, there would be a very persuasive argument for putting Lawson ahead of Miyata. But, drivers that contest both series are always likely to have a small edge, as they have twice as many chances over the year to put themselves in the spotlight. And boy did Miyata do that this season.
From the moment he stood on the top step of the podium at Suzuka to claim his first Super Formula win, Miyata seemed to be able to permanently access a higher level of performance than we’d seen hitherto. That was clearly on display at Sugo, where he blitzed the field (albeit only after getting away with a yellow flag infringement that could have easily put him to the back of the grid), and he could have easily been celebrating a hat-trick of wins had his TOM’S crew not made a rare pit strategy error in the previous race at Autopolis.
Speaking of the Kyushu track, it was the penultimate round of the SUPER GT season at that venue where Miyata shone the brightest. His final stint was simply spellbinding as he took the #36 TOM’S Supra, with its 49kg of success ballast, to places where it had no real right to be. While the team was on top of its game after a disastrous opening round at Okayama, that Autopolis race left observers in no doubt that it was the man behind the wheel making the difference.
Click the links to revisit the lists from 2022, 2021, 2020 and 2019.
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