The official qualifying rounds for the SUPER GT IN KYUSHU 300km, Round 7 of the AUTOBACS SUPER GT series, was scheduled to be held at the AUTOPOLIS (lap = 4.674 km) in Oita Pref. on October 5th, but bad weather conditions with rain and fog forced the cancellation of all the sessions. This is the first time that all the qualifying sessions on qualifying day have been cancelled since the SUPER GT series was first launched in 1994.

The cancelled official qualifying will be held on the morning of the 6th to decide the starting grid position for the race scheduled to begin at 2:00 in the afternoon. This day, saw rain from the morning hours. The official practice session that began at 9:00 in the morning was stopped after 48 minutes due poor visibility due to fag and the heavy rain that was falling. The officials waited for the weather and visibility to improve, but no improvement was seen by the time the session was scheduled to end at 11:00. As a result the decision was made to discontinue the practice session as it had been stopped.

Although some of the noon events and support races were held, but the track conditions worsened again due to the poor visibility in the fog and the rain that continued to fall heavily at times.

Even by the time the official qualifying was originally scheduled to start at 2:00 in the afternoon, the conditions remained bad, despite some thinning of the fog. A meeting of the Stewards of the Meeting was convened at 1:50 and it was decided that running the powerful SUPER GT machines in such conditions would be too dangerous. Thus the decision was made to cancel the day’s qualifying sessions.

The decision was made to hold the official qualifying in the morning on tomorrow’s race day (Sunday). The GT300 class qualifying is scheduled to be held for 25 minutes starting from 9:00 and the GT500 class qualifying for 25 minutes beginning at 9:25. Normally, under the SUPER GT regulations, both drivers of each team must drive in the qualifying, but this time as a special exception, the teams will be permitted to contest the qualifying with just one of their drivers.