Lamborghini’s First Super GT300 Win Came From 13th on the Grid
Team JLOC’s #87 Lamborghini Huracán GT3 Evo crossed the finish line first at the Fuji 500 Miles on August 4, 2019, delivering what Lamborghini says is its first-ever victory in the Japanese Super GT300 championship. Drivers Tsubasa Takahashi, Andre Couto, and Kiyoto Fujinami shared the cockpit for the endurance event, converting a lowly 13th-place qualifying position into a result that rewrites the brand’s record in one of Asia’s most competitive GT racing series. But the story of this win is not really about pace. It is about a single strategic call, made one lap before a safety car changed everything, that turned a mid-pack car into a race leader and handed Lamborghini a milestone it had chased for years.
Super GT300 is a dense, manufacturer-rich category where privateer teams running GT3 machinery fight against purpose-built “Mother Chassis” entries and factory-adjacent programs from Japanese automakers. JLOC (Japan Lamborghini Owners Club), one of the longest-standing Lamborghini racing operations in Asia, has been a persistent if often outgunned presence in the series. Scoring an outright class victory validates years of commitment from a team that operates without the factory budgets of some rivals.
One Lap Made the Difference
Qualifying had been disrupted by a red flag, leaving the #87 Huracán stuck in 13th. The opening laps offered no dramatic recovery; Lamborghini says the car held its starting position through the early running. In a 500-mile race at Fuji Speedway, though, raw pace in the first stint rarely decides the outcome. Pit strategy does.
The decisive moment came when JLOC’s strategists called the #87 into the pits one lap before a safety car was deployed. That single-lap margin was the entire race. Competitors who stayed out were frozen behind the safety car, unable to pit without losing track position. The Huracán emerged in the lead, and from that point Takahashi, Couto, and Fujinami managed the gap to the checkered flag.
Anyone who follows endurance racing will recognize the pattern: a well-timed stop under green, followed by a safety car that neutralizes the field and traps everyone else. It looks like luck from the outside. In practice, it requires either an aggressive pit window strategy that accepts the risk of stopping early, or a team sharp enough to read developing incidents and react before the control tower does. Lamborghini’s official account credits the call as strategic rather than fortunate, and the result supports that reading. Without that gamble, the #87 likely finishes somewhere in the lower half of the field. With it, Lamborghini owns a piece of Super GT history.
The Drivers Behind the Strategy
A bold pit call only works if the drivers who inherit the lead can protect it, and the trio JLOC assembled for Fuji proved well suited to the task. Takahashi framed the result in the context of a debut season. According to Lamborghini, his stated goal for the year was a single victory, and Fuji delivered it. Couto, the veteran of the trio and a Macanese racer with deep Asian GT experience, emphasized the historical weight of the moment, calling it JLOC’s first win and noting the prestige of achieving it at the 500-mile event specifically. Fujinami, racing as the third driver, credited his co-drivers and the team environment for putting him in a position to contribute.
GT3 customer racing programs live and die on driver combinations. Pairing a local driver with an experienced international and a developing talent is a classic endurance formula. Each driver needs to be fast enough not to lose time, consistent enough not to damage the car, and disciplined enough to follow the strategy even when instinct says otherwise. The Fuji result suggests JLOC got that balance right, and that balance is what allowed the strategic gamble to pay off rather than unravel over the remaining distance.
The sister #88 Manepa Lamborghini Huracán recovered to fifth in class after being hit early by the #52 Toyota, a solid salvage job that underlines the durability of the platform even after contact.
Why the Huracán GT3 Evo Suits This Kind of Racing
Strategy wins races, but only if the car beneath the strategy can execute. The Huracán GT3 Evo is powered by a 5.2-liter naturally aspirated V10, a powerplant whose character sets it apart from the turbocharged engines found in several competing GT3 cars. In Balance of Performance-regulated racing, outright power figures are equalized by organizers, so the engine’s advantage is less about peak numbers and more about throttle response, predictability, and the confidence it gives drivers exiting slow corners.
The “Evo” designation reflects engineering work aimed at improving drivability. In customer racing that word carries specific meaning: a car that a gentleman driver can push hard without the rear stepping out unpredictably is a car that loses less time across a stint. For a team like JLOC, running a mix of professional and amateur-level drivers across long races, that characteristic is a genuine competitive tool, and it directly supports the kind of strategy-first approach that won at Fuji.
Lamborghini’s Squadra Corse division developed the GT3 Evo as a fully homologated GT3 race car, eligible for series worldwide. The same platform competes in the Blancpain GT Series (now GT World Challenge), IMSA, and numerous national championships. Fuji proved it could win in the Super GT300 environment too, a series with its own unique tire regulations, fuel-flow restrictions, and strategic rhythms that differ from European or American GT3 racing.
A Foundation That Did Not Exist Before Fuji
Winning in Japan carries disproportionate value for a European supercar manufacturer. The Japanese market prizes engineering credibility, and Super GT is one of the country’s most-watched motorsport properties. A victory at Fuji, particularly in the prestigious 500-mile format, gives Lamborghini a talking point that resonates with Japanese enthusiasts and potential customers in ways that European race results cannot replicate.
Lamborghini’s GT3 customer racing program competes for attention against well-established operations from Porsche, Ferrari, and Mercedes-AMG, all of which field GT3 cars in various Asian championships. The Fuji win does not erase the depth of those rivals’ programs, but it establishes that the Huracán GT3 Evo can compete at the sharp end in a series where Japanese teams often favor domestic or more established European machinery. For JLOC, the result also strengthens the case for continued investment in the Lamborghini platform.
Lamborghini has not publicly detailed its long-term Asian motorsport strategy beyond the customer racing model, where teams purchase and campaign cars with factory technical support. Whether the Fuji result translates into additional teams adopting the platform, or into a more visible factory-backed presence in the series, remains an open question. What is no longer in question is the capability. A team that started 13th, gambled on a pit stop one lap before a safety car, and then held the lead to the finish now owns a result in one of Asia’s toughest GT championships. That foundation did not exist before August 4, 2019.
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