> Result: FP3
KCMG and Nissan led final practice at Suzuka this morning ahead of Blancpain GT Series Asia qualifying, while Craft-Bamboo’s Mercedes-AMG topped the GT4 standings.
Times returned to roughly the same level as FP1 following yesterday’s sluggish second session, with KCMG’s Edoardo Liberati posting a best of 2m02.549s aboard the #23 GT-R NISMO he shares with Florian Strauss. That was just 0.1s slower than Raffaele Marciello’s current weekend benchmark and 0.272s quicker than Marco Mapelli in second.
FFF Racing Team elected to restrict track time yesterday but finally showed their hand by also finishing third courtesy of championship leaders Martin Kodric and Dennis Lind, who were 0.6s down on Mapelli’s sister Lamborghini Huracan.
Marciello settled for fourth in GruppeM’s Mercedes-AMG, which finished ahead of Phoenix Racing Asia’s Audi (Thong/Yoong) and Saccess Racing’s leading race-by-race entry (Kondo/Yokomizo).
Elsewhere, Mercedes-AMG maintained its grip on the GT4 class, although there were new names at the top of the class after GruppeM were finally toppled by Craft-Bamboo’s Jean Marc Merlin and Frank Yu.
The latter's best of 2m17.940s was 0.5s faster than yesterday’s pace-setting duo of Ryuichirou Ohtsuku and Reinhold Renger, and another four tenths up on Team iRace.Win’s entry shared by Gilles Vannelet and Ringo Chong.
TTR Team SARD’s Porsche finished best of the rest in fourth, ahead of BMW Team Studie and Taiwan Top Speed Racing (Porsche).
Qualifying for both of this weekend’s races begins at 09:50. Watch it live on Blancpain GT Series Asia’s Facebook page and website.