Photo: KCMG
TGM Grand Prix has signed rookie Seita Nonaka, a Toyota junior, to a race seat for the remainder of the Super Formula season.
Nonaka will replace fellow 24-year-old and Toyota protege Hibiki Taira in TMG GP’s line-up, after Taira underperformed in the first five races.
Taira was the 2023 Super Formula Lights runner-up and did four SF races last year with Team Impul. He had a best result of ninth, enough to earn a full-time seat elsewhere on the grid for 2025. But this season he has qualified no higher than 18th, and finished no higher than 13th, so has been demoted by TGM GP to being its reserve driver for the four rounds left.
Nonaka was 2021 Japanese Formula 4 champion, then spent close to four seasons in the third-tier SF Lights series with TOM’S. He won six races, and was third in the 2024 standings.
He made his SF debut earlier this year by substituting for the injured Oliver Rasmussen at Impul in the season-opening Suzuka double-header. In the following double-header at Twing Ring Motegi, he stood in for Kamui Kobayashi at KCMG due to a World Endurance Championship date clash making Kobayashi unavailable.
Nonaka started 19th and finished 17th in his first race after amassing 1m15s in penalties, and the next day he came 19th. His Motegi weekend was far better, finishing 11th in race one and scoring a point by finishing eighth in race two.
Ahead of the next races in July at Fuji Speedway, Nonaka will get to settle into his TGM GP seat when SF tests at the track on June 6/7.
The Le Mans 24 Hours’ test day is on June 8, and Kobayashi will be attending as he is Toyota’s team principal and one of its drivers in WEC. KCMG will therefore be calling up Rikuto Kobayashi to test at Fuji.
The Toyota junior’s primary programme this year is in SF Lights, where he is racing for TOM’S. The 19-year-old won three races with the team in 2024 en route to second in the points as a rookie, and sits fourth in the 2025 standings after the first two race weekends.
Between those two rounds he made his debut at the top level of single-seaters by standing in for Rasmussen in Impul’s SF line-up at Motegi. He qualified 15th and finished 16th on debut, then retired from 16th on the grid the next day.
Since he is only in his fourth year of car racing, Kobayashi is also building experience by sharing a Ferrari 296 GT3 sportscar with fellow SF racer and Formula 2 race-winner Zak O’Sullivan in Super GT’s GT300 class. They are 10th in the standings after the first two races.
At the Fuji test, Kobayashi will share driving duties with former SF racer Yuhi Sekiguchi due to his inexperience. But should he be called up to race again, Kobayashi will be free as none of SF Lights and Super GT’s remaining rounds clash with SF.