Lyons Set for Super GT Opener at Okayama – Motorsport.ie

This weekend sees the start of the SuperGT 2016 campaign for Hillsborough local Richard Lyons and his team, Audi Team Hitotsuyama.

Lyons will take the wheel of the new spec Audi R8 for the 2016 season with great optimism, and will be looking to build on last seasons efforts. Dunlop join the fold as new tyre suppliers to Hitotsuyama, and Blancpain winning outfit WRT will again be behind the scenes in technical support, helping to guide Lyons and the team to even better results this season.

The opening round at Okayama is historically good for Lyons and his R8, scoring a strong podium 3rd last season on opening day.

The 13 turn, 3.7 KM circuit founded in 1988 is a technical circuit and well suited to the R8, the opposition will no doubt be aware of this and will be pulling out all the stops. All eyes will be looking towards Lyons and race partner Tomonobu Fujii this coming weekend to deliver the goods, scoring another opening day podium would be a fitting start to a potentially amazing season of SuperGT racing.

Richard Lyons:

“At last the start of a new season, I think most of us racers can’t wait to rip into some racing after months of preparations. Okayama Circuit opens the Super GT season, last year it was good to us netting a podium, and this year we hope for much of the same. Although with so many new cars on the grid it really is hard to know where we’ll end up but as a team we’ve really made massive improvements. The last few weeks we’ve had a very intensive tire development programme, as well as pit stop practice and other small fine tuning that goes into preparing for a season. I feel this is the best prepared we’ve been as a team, and I expect our Audi R8 LMS and all of our Audi Team Hitotsuyama to be fighting at the front from round 1.”