Vol.01【Road to 8HOURS 2026】Top One-Match Teams Begin to Appear

The Suzuka 8 Hours Endurance Road Race, often held in the last week of July, will be held in the first week of July this year, with the final race on Sunday, July 5. Although the race will be held a month earlier than usual, it will still be a midsummer festival and the third of the four rounds of the World Endurance Championship. The official open test will start on May 12, and the teams competing in the race are gradually becoming clear. There are three main types of teams competing in Hachi-Tai: (1) regular teams competing in the World Endurance Championship, (2) Japanese one-match works teams organized exclusively for this event, and (3) teams whose parent teams are members competing in the All-Japan Championship. The original team, organized only for this event, will be added to these three types of teams to compete for the championship.

Honda HRC, which has won the championship four years in a row, has Jonathan Rey as its top candidate for the championship.

First, the Honda camp, which has won four consecutive championships from the 43rd event in 2010 to the 46th event in 2013. HRC has been matching Takumi Takahashi, who has been leading the team since 2010 during the four consecutive championships, with Johann Zarco, who has won two consecutive championships from 2012 to 2013, and Jonathan Rey, a test rider for the Honda WSBK camp since 2013, as the third rider. In the 46th round last year, Honda HRC was forced to compete with a two-rider system due to a succession of injuries to the third rider, and Takahashi and Zarco competed in the Hachi-Tai with two riders. Rey, who has won Hachi-Tai championships with Honda in 2012 and Kawasaki in 2007, was chosen as the third rider. "I am very happy and proud to be returning to Hachi-Tai as a Honda HRC rider and to be a part of a team that has won four consecutive championships. Although I have been away from Hachi-Tai for a while, there is no doubt about the potential of the CBR1000RR-R at Suzuka Circuit. Together with Takumi and Johan, I will do my best to grab the victory," said Rey. The trio of riders with a total of 11 Hachi-Tai victories - Takahashi seven times, Zarco twice, and Rey twice - are the leading contenders for the championship.

The Yamaha factory will be aiming to overthrow HRC with the same lineup as in the 25-year event!

Before Honda's four consecutive victories, the Yamaha team (=Yamaha Factory Racing Team (=YFRT)) won four consecutive championships from 2003 to 2006. The Yamaha team will be led by Katsuyuki Nakasuga, who has announced his retirement from all-Japan road racing at the end of this season, and the trio of MotoGP rider Jack Miller and Andrea Locatelli, who took pole position in last year's event, will aim to overthrow HRC with the same lineup as in the 25th race. After finishing in second place in the 46th YFRT last year while running the same lap as the winning Honda HRC, the YFRT team declared its intention to take revenge early on, and decided to field the same team as the one that had suffered the same setback last year. The trio of Nakasuga, who has announced his retirement but is still a top-notch rider, Miller, the world's best MotoGP rider, and Locatelli, a WSBK rider who knows the YZF-R1 inside and out, is a seamless team. The trio is looking for a year of revenge for last year's loss. Last year I had a crash in the Top 10 trial and finished 2nd in the final, which was very disappointing. This year, my goal is to improve on everything I did last year. I want to be in the middle of the podium with Nakasugasan, who is retiring at the end of this season! said Miller. .

Ryo Mizuno from DUCATI TEAM KAGAYAMA will join the Suzuki team.

Suzuki, which is competing against two works teams, Honda and Yamaha, is taking a new direction for the Hachi-Tai from the 2024 event. The new direction is called CN (Carbon Neutral), a race activity that reflects the current world situation. The team name is Team SUZUKI CN Challenge, and the class is Experimental, which is outside of the ranking prize system. Although the team is effectively outside of the EWC regulations, the engineers and staff of Team SUZUKI, as well as the Hachitarai fans, consider the team to be competing on the same level as Honda and Yamaha. The members of Team SUZUKI CN Challenge are Takuya Tsuda, who has been competing in All Japan Road Race from the team, Etienne Masson, a key member of the team's activities for the past two years, and a remarkable third member, who is an All Japan The third high-profile member of the team is Ryo Mizuno, who has been competing in All-Japan road racing with DUCATI TEAM KAGAYAMA for the past 24-25 years. TEAM KAGAYAMA, which raced the DUCATI Panigale V4R in the Hachi-Tai in 2012 and 2013, announced that it would not participate in this year's event in order to focus its resources on winning the All Japan Road Race championship in 2014. As a result, TEAM KAGAYAMA's rider Mizuno was loaned to Suzuki's team to compete in the event. Mizuno is riding a Suzuki machine for the first time, including on a minibike and in his junior years. His performance as a rider is beyond reproach, so it will be interesting to see how the challenge of riding a Hachi-Tai for the first time pans out. The one-match works teams that will be formed just for the Hachi-Tai are beginning to appear. In the next issue of this column, we will report on the regular teams that will be competing in the Suzuka 8 Hours as part of the World Championship series. <Continued> To the gallery (6)