After two years of dominating Super Formula, Nojiri returned to earth in 2023 amid his struggles to come to terms with the new SF23 aero package, with its reduced rear downforce and resultant shift towards oversteer. That showed when he suffered an uncharacteristic pre-season testing crash.
Matters weren’t helped by Liam Lawson’s arrival on the other side of the Team Mugen garage, and yet he still matched the Kiwi’s tally of three wins, with the pair split by just half a point in the standings despite Nojiri missing Autopolis with a health scare. With champion Ritomo Miyata and Lawson both moving on, Nojiri enters 2024 as the heavy favourite.
Did punctured lung cost Nojiri a historic hat-trick?
A glance at the Super Formula title standings shows that Nojiri ranked third, 8.5 points down on Miyata, despite missing a race. That was in the fourth round of the year at Autopolis, where Nojiri complained of chest pain while he was already on his way to the track, went to hospital, and was diagnosed with a pneumothorax, essentially a small hole in one of his lungs.
The result was his first absence from a race since his 2014 debut.
The fact that Nojiri’s stand-in Hiroki Otsu crashed out of Q1 and started from the back of the grid makes it hard to judge exactly where the two-time champion would have fitted in had been well enough to race.
However, simple maths dictates that nine points - one bonus point in qualifying and a fourth-place finish in the race - from that weekend would have been enough for him to be eventually crowned champion and emulate Satoru Nakajima’s feat of three straight top formula titles between 1984 and 1986 in Japanese Formula 2. Considering that team-mate Lawson won the race, it’s not hard to imagine Nojiri clearing that target.
Then again, it’s easy to turn things around and point out the fact that Nojiri got extremely lucky in the penultimate round of the season at Suzuka, where Ukyo Sasahara’s horror 130R crash led to the race being cut short and allowed Nojiri to keep the win (albeit with half points). Few believe that Nojiri had the pace to keep Miyata at bay on that occasion, and if we give Miyata the full 20 points and Nojiri 15 for second, Miyata wins the title by 13 points. Then, suddenly, Nojiri needs second place at Autopolis, or third from pole.
Indeed, history can be rewritten in many different ways should you so choose. For example, what if Miyata was punished for a yellow flag infringement in qualifying at Sugo, as officials subsequently admitted he should have been? Then we would almost certainly be celebrating a historic rookie title success for Lawson, punctured lung or not for Nojiri.
