Cassidy and Hirakawa to the top

Cassidy led the race from his Welsh flatmate Mardenborough. As the track dried out, the first pitstops provided a chance for a change to slicks. Nevertheless, the leading Lexus was untroubled as Hirakawa brought it home with a 12s margin.

Up to second came the Le Mans team’s Lexus of Andrea Caldarelli and Kazuya Oshima, this pair therefore moving into second in the points. Leading the standings before the weekend was the NISMO Nissan of Ronnie Quintarelli and Tsugio Matsuda. The Italian was one of the few to start the race on slicks but, laden with 59kg of ballast, they could only bring the car home in ninth place.

There was heartbreak late on for Mardenborough and NISMO, as co-driver Hironobu Yasuda suffered engine failure with three laps remaining while running in third place, promoting the Honda of Koudai Tsukakoshi and Takashi Kogure. 1 Nick Cassidy/ryo Hirakawa (Lexus LC 500) 66 laps in 1h42m48.674s; 2 Kazuya Oshima/andrea Caldarelli (Lexus) +12.121s; 3 Koudai Tsukakoshi/takashi Kogure (Honda NSX-GT); 4 Yuji Tachikawa/hiroaki Ishiura (Lexus); 5 Kazuki Nakajima/james Rossiter (Lexus); 6 Heikki Kovalainen/kohei Hirate (Lexus);

7 Naoki Yamamoto/takuya Izawa (Honda); 8 Bertrand Baguette/ Kosuke Matsuura (Honda); 9 Ronnie Quintarelli/tsugio Matsuda (Nissan GT-R); 10 Satoshi Motoyama/katsumasa Chiyo (Nissan). Points 1 Hirakawa/cassidy 69; 2 Caldarelli/oshima 63; 3 Matsuda/ Quintarelli 61; 4 Rossiter 53; 5 Ishiura/tachikawa 51; 6 Nakajima 47.