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Hope there will be more victories coming the next years for the BMW drivers...

Kazuke Nakajima(this one has known last name cause his father was another horrible japanese driver"), Kobayashi, Yamamoto e etc are all nobodies, still they got in F1 cause they are japaneses. This Macau winner have a name now, if he does a medium performance in GP2, it will be enough for him to go to F1.
Imo the only decent japanese driver that got in F1 was Sato.


It's a enough victoy for a japanese driver. Probably this guy will atract japanese sponsors so he can go to a good GP2 team and start his way out to F1.

Kunimoto is also part of the Toyota young drivers program.

in that case he could replace Nakajima at williams in a few years

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Toyota backing means sod all these days. They give any half-decent Japanese driver (and some of other nationalities) backing. Where are Franck Perera and Kohei Hirate these days? And didn't they back Alex Storckenfeldt as well? He's disappeared completely off the racing map

The Toyota engine was very strong all weekend, as it was last year, and a few of the better drivers were stranded further down the field like Hartley. I think his win will be taken with at least a pinch of salt by the European team bosses

Mortara was impressive this weekend, though. He's been very solid in F3 for 2 years now so I wouldn't be surprised if a few teams started taking a keen interest in him. But then you need big backing to get into F1 these days. Something Hartley does have. I wouldn't be surprised to see him racing for Toro Rosso soon instead of just testing

Thanks everyone!

Really, the Japanese drivers always get into F1 because of their sponsorship and engine connections. Shame not many of them are talented enough to regularly churn out good F1 results.

Satoru Nakajima didn't set the 1986 F3000 season on fire but by the summer of 1986, he was already signed up to drive for Lotus and he provided the gateway for Honda to provide engines for Lotus and some Espon sponsorship.

He did the same when he went to Tyrrell in 1990 as well.

Now Taku Sato > Honda, Kazuke Nakajima > Toyota.

Interestingly for me, I don't know how Aguri Suzuki got into F1 but it was Larrousse that gave him his F1 debut and Zakspeed give him a 1989 contract and they was running Yahama engines (I guess he got good connections because of his Japanese F3000 involvements)

He got involved with Honda together with the Formula Dream racing series and an IRL team.

I feel it is a shame that not many Japanese drivers go up to the top of the motorsport ladder purely just on talent alone.

So I guess that Kunimoto might end up in a Toyota test drive because of his connections alone. But if he regularly wins or gain points in F1 in the future then he got talent for sure.

I thought Farfus was very close on the onboard from Thompson's car when the BMW appeared after Thompson had bounced off the wall. Incredible for the cameras to miss that, there weren't even any other cars close by for the camera to be following instead...