Japan Grand Prix, The Early Days

Continuing on the motorsports theme, our next stop is at the Japan Grand Prix. This one comes by way of banpei and appears to be a DVD about the race. Unfortunately embedding was disabled so you’ll have to click on the links below to watch the videos.

Part 1 starts off with the first ever Japan Grand Prix, held at the newly constructed Suzuka Circuit in 1963. It was first race of its kind and also the first major event to be held at Suzuka, so expectations were running high for a domestic manufacturer to win for the home team.

And Nissan did not disappoint. In the Sports Car B-II class (which included cars of up to 2.5 liters), the famous No. 39 Fairlady 1500 Roadster with Genichi Tahara behind the wheel took first place, beating out a field of Triumphs, MGs and Fiats.

This was followed by the Touring Class, which oddly enough meant big sedans. Here, Toyota fans will be pleased to learn that an S40 Crown beat out an Isuzu Bellel, Ford Taunus and a field of Nissan Cedrics and Prince Glorias (Nissan and Prince were yet to merge) to take the checkered flag.

As a result of the Fairlady’s success, the 1964 field was flooded with them. Unfortunately, the GT-II class allocation put them in contention against six-cylinder Prince Skyline GT-Bs. A Porsche 904 ultimately won, with a pair of Skylines rounding out the top three.

You can watch Part 2, but this is getting a bit long, so we’ll continue with the analysis of Part 2 in the next post.

UPDATE: Nevermind, let’s continue here, since the rest of the video, is completely devoted to  the 1967 GP anyway. As you can see, by then the cars have stopped resembling road cars at all. Prince came to the table with the R390 prototype racers. It was a fiercely contested battle but in the end a Porsche Carrera 6 won the day, with two Prince R380s supplementing the podium.