Sasahara split with Honda at the end of last season off the back of losing his Super Formula seat at Team Mugen to Red Bull junior driver Liam Lawson, despite scoring two race wins in 2022.
Although not yet confirmed, he is expected to become a Toyota factory driver in 2023 with the TOM’S outfit, having tested for the squad in both Super Formula and SUPER GT over the winter.
Discussing Sasahara’s exit from Honda after a strong Super Formula campaign in which he was the brand’s third-highest scoring driver, Nagai said that Sasahara had been made an offer to stay in the Honda stable, only for him to turn it down.
“I rate Sasahara very highly,” Nagai told Motorsport.com’s Japanese edition. “We made him an offer to continue in keeping with this evaluation.
“He was the first Honda driver to score two wins last season. I thought, ‘he’s the real deal’, and that we were thinking ‘we’ll surely continue together’.
“However, he seemed to have given it a lot of thought and had his own ideas about what he wanted to do. He decided he wanted to take a different path and we thought we shouldn’t stand in his way.
“My impression was that there was something he wanted to do, and that he had his heart set on it.”
While Mugen was unlikely to ever have room for Sasahara as it rekindled its previous relationship with Red Bull for 2023, it’s understood that the 26-year-old’s preferred alternative of a seat at Dandelion Racing - where he spent two races in 2021 as a stand-in - was not on offer.
Without revealing which team Sasahara was invited to race for in 2023, Nagai suggested that such decisions could not be based purely on race results from the past season.
“We can’t say which is the second-best team or third-best team, but even if we were to put all the teams in some kind of order, it’s not as simple as just assigning drivers to teams in the order they finished in the championship,” he explained.
“We have to consider the compatibility between the driver and the team, as well as compatibility with the teammate. We have to take that into account and work out what is the best combination.”
Nagai was eager to add that Sasahara would be welcome to return to Honda in the future if the circumstances are right, citing the example of Nobuharu Matsushita returning to the fold after a single season away at Nissan.
“Just because a driver left us once, I wouldn’t say to them, ‘don’t darken my door again’,” he said. “Honda won’t say that.
“I tell them to first go and try it [experiencing another manufacturer]. It’s the same reason I invited Matsushita back to Honda last year. I don’t deny drivers the chance to leave and come back, because the driver could become stronger.”
