Honda's new GT500 machine has scored its first race victory — and led another Honda entry home for a 1-2 finish.
What happened at Fuji
Round 4 of the 2026 Super GT season ran August 1–2 at Fuji Speedway. In Saturday qualifying, the No. 8 ARTA MUGEN HRC PRELUDE-GT, driven by Kakunoshin Ota and Hiroki Otsu, took GT500 pole position with a 1:26.776 lap. The race itself got off to a rough start: multiple GT500 cars made contact in the opening laps, triggering a red flag before the field went back green a few laps later. When the race resumed, it was a different Honda entry that came out on top: the No. 100 STANLEY HRC PRELUDE-GT, driven by Naoki Yamamoto and Tadasuke Makino, took the win, with the No. 8 car following it home for a Honda 1-2. Third place in GT500 went to the No. 37 Deloitte TOM'S GR Supra.
In GT300, the No. 52 Green Brave GR Supra GT, driven by Hiroki Yoshida and Seita Nonaka, won after a bold two-tire-only pit strategy paid off.
Why it matters
Super GT is Japan's premier domestic GT championship, and GT500 is its top class — purpose-built silhouette race cars carrying Honda, Nissan, and Toyota production-car nameplates but sharing very little mechanically with their road-going counterparts. Honda has cycled through base cars quickly in this class: the NSX-GT ran for years before Honda switched to a Civic Type R-GT for the 2024 and 2025 seasons. That car lasted only two years before Honda swapped in the new HRC Prelude-GT for 2026, built around the Prelude nameplate the brand revived as a road car in 2025.
Fuji Round 4 was the Prelude-GT's first race win since it joined the GT500 grid this season — a strong result for Honda's new GT500 package, and one made sweeter by occupying the top two steps of the podium in the same weekend the No. 8 car had already claimed pole. It's worth noting the two winning cars aren't teammates in the usual sense: the No. 8 ARTA MUGEN and No. 100 STANLEY TEAM KUNIMITSU are separate, independently run outfits that both happen to field the Honda/HRC Prelude-GT.
For fans who grew up associating "Prelude" with Honda's front-drive coupes of the '80s and '90s, seeing the name back on a factory GT500 winner — after the Civic Type R-GT had represented Honda through the 2025 season — adds another layer to Honda's ongoing reintroduction of the Prelude name into its current lineup.
The Fuji weekend in numbers
The event was run as the "FUJI GT 300km RACE," with Saturday given over to qualifying and Sunday to the race itself. In GT500, the No. 8 ARTA MUGEN HRC PRELUDE-GT's pole lap of 1:26.776 was quick enough to hold off the rest of the 14-car GT500 field, while in GT300 the No. 45 PONOS Ferrari 296 EVO qualified fastest among a 29-car field with a 1:36.209. Sunday flipped the GT500 order: the No. 100 STANLEY HRC PRELUDE-GT came through to win, with the No. 8 car settling for second — still a 1-2 finish for Honda — and the No. 37 Deloitte TOM'S GR Supra completing the podium in third.
Where the Prelude-GT stands in the championship
Per Car Watch's provisional GT500 points table, the win moved the No. 100 STANLEY HRC PRELUDE-GT crew of Yamamoto and Makino up to third in the standings with 54 points, behind the No. 36 car (96 points) and the No. 14 car (56 points). We haven't yet confirmed how the Prelude-GT performed in the races before Fuji, and will follow up once that context is available.