Satoshi
Motoyama

Satoshi Motoyama was born in Tokyo on 4 March 1971 and started karting in 1984 at the age of 13. He won the A1 class of the All-Japan Karting Championship in 1986 and the A2 class in 1987 and 1989. In 1990 he moved up to the All-Japan Formula Three Championship. In 1995, driving for Dome, he finished runner-up to Pedro de la Rosa and won one race. From 1995 to 1997 he also raced in the Japanese Touring Car Championship, taking three wins and third place in the standings with Nismo in 1997.

He made his Formula Nippon debut in 1996 with Funai Super Aguri. The series is now called Super Formula. In 1998 he took his first win and his first title with Team LeMans. Further titles followed in 2001, 2003 and 2005, the last two with Team Impul. In 2002 he won five of the ten races but lost the title to Ralph Firman by two points. He finished with 27 wins, the last of them at Suzuka in 2007. He drove for Team LeMans again in 2008 and did not compete in the series in 2009.

In the All-Japan GT Championship, later known as Super GT, he made his debut in 1996 in the GT300 class and took pole position in his first race. From 1997 he raced in GT500. In 2003 he won the GT500 title with Michael Krumm in a Nismo Nissan, and the same year he also won Formula Nippon. Only Pedro de la Rosa had achieved that double before him, in 1997. He defended the GT500 title in 2004 with Richard Lyons and won a third with Benoît Tréluyer in 2008, making him the first three-time GT500 champion. His last GT500 race was at Motegi on 11 November 2018, where he finished ninth. In 2019 he announced his retirement as a Nissan GT500 driver and became an adviser to Nissan's factory GT500 programme.

He took part in the 24 Hours of Le Mans four times. In 1998 he finished tenth overall in a Nissan R390 GT1, and further starts followed in 1999, in the DeltaWing in 2012 and in the electric ZEOD RC in 2014. He never started a Formula One World Championship race. In 2003 he took part in a Friday test for Jordan ahead of the Japanese Grand Prix and in December tested for Renault at Jerez, completing 69 laps. No seat for 2004 materialised. In March 2018 he became team director of B-Max Racing in Super Formula.

Source: Wikipedia, “Satoshi Motoyama”. Text licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.