Kunimitsu
Takahashi

Kunimitsu Takahashi was born in Tokyo on 29 January 1940. He began his career on two wheels, racing motorcycles from 1958 to 1963. In 1961 he won at Hockenheim on a 250cc Honda, becoming the first Japanese rider to win a motorcycle Grand Prix. He took four Grand Prix victories in total, and his best world championship results were two fourth places, in the 250cc class in 1961 and the 125cc class in 1962, both on Honda. After a crash at the Isle of Man TT in 1962, he switched to car racing in 1965.

Takahashi started just one Formula One race, the Japanese Grand Prix on 23 October 1977. He drove a privately run Tyrrell, the car Kazuyoshi Hoshino had used in the 1976 Japanese Grand Prix. Takahashi finished ninth and so scored no championship points.

Outside Formula One he was four times All-Japan Sports Prototype champion, won in Japanese Top Formula, touring cars and the JGTC grand touring series, and raced in Japanese Formula 3000 from 1987 to 1992. Between 1986 and 1996 he contested the 24 Hours of Le Mans eight times. In 1995 his team won the GT2 class there in a Honda NSX and finished eighth overall.

In 1994 he founded Team Kunimitsu, which entered the first JGTC season with a Porsche 911 RSR Turbo, driven alongside Keiichi Tsuchiya. The team moved from Porsche to Honda in 1996. Takahashi took his last win as a driver in 1999 at the age of 59. At the end of that season he retired from driving to concentrate on running the team. From 1993 to 2007 he was chairman of the GT Association, which organises the Super GT series. In 2018 his team won its first drivers' title with Naoki Yamamoto and Jenson Button. Takahashi died on 16 March 2022, aged 82.

Source: Wikipedia, “Kunimitsu Takahashi”. Text licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.