The Malaysian round is now a regular fixture of the championship as its only overseas event. The third round of the season, the Super GT International Series Malaysia, was held at Sepang International Circuit on June 18-19.

It was slightly hotter on Sunday than it had been on the qualifying day, Saturday. The sky was overcast but the air and surface temperatures were as high as 34 and 43 centigrade respectively at 2 p.m., the time to start the race.

Bjorn Wirdheim was at the wheel of ADVAN Kondo GT-R when the race got underway. Starting from the eighth grid, he steered clear of the accident at Turn 1 of the opening lap and he completed the lap in fifth by overtaking another car on his way.

In the early stage, the Swede was fighting for fourth but was gradually losing speed. However, the team had already anticipated it, as they observed a certain performance change during the warm up session in the morning. So the team was ready to cut short the first stint and make a pit stop at the earliest possible opportunity. Despite being pushed hard by an opponent from behind, Wirdheim was running in fifth by displaying his superb race craft when he came in the pit at the end of Lap 16.

The team changed four tires and rapidly sent the second driver, Hironobu Yasuda, back to the track without any delay. Thanks partly to Bjorn's good job, the Japanese driver found himself running in fourth when all cars had done their mandatory stops. Eventually, ADVAN Kondo GT-R remained in that position until the flag fell and finished in fourth, which was quite a good result even though they missed getting on the podium.

WedsSport ADVAN SC430 started the race with Tatsuya Kataoka at the wheel. He was in 15th for a while after the start but his steady drive earned a few positions, while some of his opponents fell back by accidents or by making mistakes. After showing a strong performance and comparable pace with his direct rivals, Kataoka came back to the pit at the end of Lap 20. Being charged with the second stint, Seiji Ara managed to pass a GT-R on Lap 41 and moved up to tenth where the championship point was to be awarded. However, on the next lap, he was overtaken by a rival team's SC430 and had to settle for finishing in eleventh, which meant the team narrowly missed the opportunity to add a point to their tally which they had opened at the Fuji round.

As for the GT300, the pole sitter, Nobuteru Taniguchi, in Hatsune Miku Goodsmile BMW, easily pulled away from the rest of the field by utilizing the car's superior straight line speed immediately after the start. Due partly to contact between the following cars after they went through Turn 1, Taniguchi gained as much as three and half seconds to the runner-up in just one lap!

Meanwhile, Hideki Yamauchi in Pacific NAC Ikamusume Ferrari and Yuhi Sekiguchi in JLOC Lamborghini RG-3, which started the race from the second and third grid, swapped their positions and, with another Ferrari in between them, the three cars were fighting for the second place.

On Lap 10, to everyone's surprise, Evangelion RT Test-01 IM Jihan Shiden caught up this group, despite being forced to start the race from the back end of grid due to a problem in the qualifying session. The car certainly had speed on this track and was the fastest during the warm up session in the morning but it was still remarkable that Hiroki Kato moved up to there just in ten laps.

On Lap 14, Sekiguchi took up the third place, as the Ferrari in front of him made the pit stop earlier than others. The Lamborghini driver then gained one more place on the next lap by passing Yamauchi who made a small mistake in Turn 3. Yamauchi visited his pit on Lap 21 and Sekiguchi did the same the lap after that. Now second place was taken over by Kato in Shiden.

In the meantime, Taniguchi had been building the gap little by little while managing his tires very well. The gap reached to 15 seconds when he came in the pit on Lap 25, as initially planned, to change to Taku Banba. The team crew did a perfect job in changing four tires and Hatsune Miku Goodsmile BMW resumed racing with Banba at the wheel.

The provisional race leader at the time, Kato in Shiden changed to Kazuho Takahashi on Lap 29. The team opted not to change tires and Takahashi was in third when he joined the race after the pit stop. The Shiden's stop meant the BMW regained the top slot with a sufficient margin although it was now reduced to around ten seconds.

With six laps to go, however, the gap that Banba had with the second placed Ferrari suddenly shrunk up to less than two seconds! He spent up the margin by making a poor judgment when he was lapped by a GT500 car. The mood in the team's garage took an unexpected turn and the crew got nervous about the situation.

While the Ferrari was snapping at his heels, Banba managed to fend off the repeated attacks from behind and, after all, secured the class win with just a 0.8 second margin. This was the team's maiden victory in the fourth year from its foundation.

Despite being overshadowed by the thrilling battle for the victory, Pacific NAC Ikamusume Ferrari took up the third place. JLOC Lamborghini RG-3 pushed the ADVAN shoed Ferrari really hard in the second half of the race but the former was forced to fall back due to a gearbox malfunction, which allowed Yamagishi/Yamauchi pair to get on the final place of the podium.

　[Result : 4th in the GT500 class]
"In the closing stage, two Lexus cars were catching up to me with a blistering pace, battling each other behind me. But they often lost time to lap GT300 cars, while I was lucky enough to lap them without suffering too much, so I managed to keep my position, the fourth place, after all. After the driver change from Bjorn, I saved my pace for around ten laps but, in the end, I had to drive truly flat out because the cars behind me were so fast!
"The tires I used were different in the temperature range from the ones that Bjorn used. My rear tires degraded a little in the closing stage but they just lasted until the finish.
"Bjorn did a great job to keep his position in the early stage and I think it contributed to this result very much. If he had lost some positions, I would have had a few more cars in front of me when I came out to the track after out pit stop. As the top three cars were really fast today, the fourth place was the best result we could have hoped, I would say.

　[Result : 1st in the GT300 class]
"This was the first time to drive this car at Sepang and I thought the car might be a bit hard on tires. But my tire management worked well and I was able to extract everything that the car and tires had during my stint.
"My plan was to build a gap immediately after the start, before everyone warmed up. Then I was a bit lucky that there was a mess behind me and, for the first time I was lapped, the leading GT500 cars in one pack overtook me on a straightaway, so didn't have to give way to them and lose time. Thanks to that, I could have a considerable margin, around 15 seconds I think. But somehow that big gap reduced to nothing at the finish (laugh).
"With eight laps to go, we still had a good margin but, two laps later, it became just two seconds. I couldn't help saying 'what the heck are you doing, Banba!?' We are really happy now but, to be honest, we had gotten a little angry at him until we had this happy end (laugh).
"But we didn't expect to win in Malaysia at all and it was just beyond my imagination, so I can't be happier!

"The air and surface temperatures this weekend were lower than those when we had visited here for testing. Particularly, the conditions during the qualifying session on Saturday were very different from our anticipation and I think this was why our performance on the day just fell short of our expectations.
"As for the ADVAN Kondo GT-R's race, it was within our anticipation and that the tires might degrade to some extent in the first stint. As a result, the team made the pit stop as soon as completing the mandatory minimum laps but this had also been taken into our strategic consideration beforehand. Even though the gap with the leading cars was rather large, Wirdheim's great effort to keep the car's position was one of the main contributions for the result, despite the surface temperature was really high in the early stage.
"For the Yasuda's stint after that, we chose the tires which were one step harder than those used by Wirdheim, taking the remaining laps into account. Under the conditions we had this weekend, the fourth place was the best possible result that was achieved through the strategy and its proper execution by the team and ourselves. We would like to thank for the team's and the drivers' efforts
"In the GT300 class, Hatsune Miku Goodsmile BMW accomplished a superb pole-to-win. In the closing stage, the car was pushed hard by the opponent due to an unlucky encounter with a GT500 car, but the tires it used had no problem at all. As a tire supplier, we are glad to see that our products are good enough to support the winner's performance.
"We will continue to take steady development steps and then will verify them in testing at Suzuka. So we hope to race with the more advanced tires which shall have the even higher performance level in the next Sugo round."