The GLW Racing Team participated in the 4th round of the TOYOTA GAZOO Racing Rally Challenge in Susono, Mount Fuji, Shizuoka Prefecture, held on May 11th and 12th.
This marked our second Rally Challenge participation, with driver Hideaki Ohno and co-driver Shingo Sugiura.
Despite it being Sugiura’s first rally experience, we managed to finish the race.
But the highlight of this event was our fully wrapped Vitz, which we couldn’t complete in time for our first participation.
The eye-catching wrap made the car stand out significantly at the venue.
This time, the course was challenging overall, with many curves that required precise carving skills at each turn.
Additionally, during the first stage (SS1), we encountered trouble by hitting a pylon in a corner, making the first half particularly tough.
On other mountainous road sections, our understanding of the car and the course was still lacking, causing us to fall behind the rival cars by several seconds.
However, in the latter half, on the same course for SS4, we managed to correct the mistakes from the first half and achieved a strong result, finishing 3rd in our class for SS4 alone.
In SS5 and SS6, we were able to post times that were over two seconds faster than the first half, and we felt our performance improving steadily towards the end.
We finished the race in 8th place in our class in the end.
Although we managed to improve by one position from the last race, there are still many points for reflection.
In future events, we aim to leverage the lessons learned from this race, such as our speed entering corners and gear changes on uphill sections, to achieve a higher ranking!
For details in SS3 and SS6, please refer to the official Rally Challenge YouTube channel.
Please refer to the official results for more details.
In addition, we had student interns join us this time!
They participated in various aspects of running the racing team, including mechanic tasks, collecting driving data and evaluating onboard videos.
We will continue to provide opportunities for younger generations to gain a lot of experiences.
We are going to share more about the internship in a separate report in the future.
Our next race will be Katsuyama Dinosaur in Fukui Prefecture on June 15th and 16th.
⚫︎About GLW
GLW is a business solution company that provides specialized technical services in the mobility industry.
Leveraging the technical expertise of each employee, we offer commissioned development, technical consulting, and engineering dispatch services.
Although a young company in the third year since its establishment, GLW has already exceeded 70 employees and supports the design and development operations of automotive manufacturers and suppliers across Japan.
A notable feature of our employee composition is that more than 70% are non-Japanese nationals. Through a combination of rich diversity and technical expertise, we aim to revolutionize Japan’s mobility industry.
For media inquiries regarding this matter, please contact: GLW Corp. Overseas Strategy Department/HR Department Senior Leader: Shingo Sugiura
TEL: +81-45-900-8393 E-mail: newg-recruit@glw.co.jp