Photo: Red Bull Content Pool
Red Bull protege Ayumu Iwasa’s Super Formula title ambitions crumbled in last weekend’s season finale at Suzuka.
After two seasons in Formula 2, the 23-year-old was overlooked for a Formula 1 role by Red Bull for 2024 and instead got a funded Super Formula campaign with Team Mugen back home in Japan.
His target as a rookie at single-seaters’ top level was to bring home the driver and teams’ titles, and it looked feasible before last weekend. Iwasa was fourth in the standings, 31 points off the top and with 46 available to score, while Mugen led by 17.5 points.
By Sunday afternoon, Mugen trailed Dandelion Racing by 16.5 points and Iwasa was fifth in the standings.
He qualified 11th and finished ninth on his debut, also at Suzuka, then at Autopolis finished second from pole and at Sportsland SUGO started and finished second.
Iwasa missed out on pole by just 0.017 seconds at Fuji Speedway, but fell to 11th on lap one and never recovered from there.
At Twin Ring Motegi he climbed from 13th on the grid to seventh, and in the first race of last month’s Fuji double-header took another second place finish. The next day was tricky, qualifying 12th and finishing sixth, which put him on the backfoot for Suzuka’s season-ending double-header.
Another front row start for race one on Saturday, ahead of all of his title rivals, was the perfect base to boost his title hopes from but a technical gremlin left him stranded on the grid. From 20th place, he recovered to ninth in the 31-lap race.
“I couldn’t get into first gear from neutral on the grid. That was a big frustration for sure, from such a good start position,” he mulled, now out of title contention. Mugen was 5.5 points behind Dandelion though, so one aim could still be achieved.
It was not to be.
“In Q2 for today’s race it was very difficult to understand what happened. We thought that we had a good car set-up and I felt that my driving was also good. I thought that I did my job but I was almost eight tenths off pole, P11. We couldn’t understand it because the feeling was so good, a very big frustration.”
“For today’s race we tried to take a quite different set-up direction to what we ran on Saturday. We went back to our baseline philosophy and that was certainly better.”
Iwasa finished a distant seventh, while team-mate Tomoki Nojiri snatched the championship runner-up spot.
“Overall this weekend I was not happy for sure. The whole weekend was up and down,” added Iwasa, who was similarly unhappy with his championship position.
“I learned really a lot of things [in 2024] and I was able to grow up quite a lot. I will use this experience for the future.”
While Red Bull does not keep juniors in Super Formula for more than one season, Iwasa is also a Honda junior so could stay on the grid in 2025.