2026 Suzuka 8 Hours cancels Top 10 Trial as bad weather hits
The 2026 Suzuka 8 Hours will not feature the usual Top 10 Trial, which has been cancelled on Saturday.
The Suzuka 8 Hours has cancelled its Top 10 Trial due to bad weather, leaving the grid to be decided by the times from Friday’s qualifying session.
That session was topped by Honda HRC ahead of the BMW Motorrad World Endurance Team.
Marc VDS KM99, YART, Yamaha Factory Racing Team, FCC TSR Honda France, Astemo Pro Honda SI Racing, Yoshimura SERT, AutoRace Ube Racing Team, and SDG Team HARC-PRO Honda were all also due to take part in the Top 10 Trial after Friday’s qualifying session, but rain on Saturday forced the cancellation of the one-lap pole position shootout session.
It means the entire 50-team grid will be set according to the results of qualifying on Friday.
That leaves Honda HRC with Jonathan Rea, Takumi Takahashi, and Somkiat Chantra on pole position for the 2026 Suzuka 8 Hours.
Yamaha’s factory team starts fifth with Jack Miller, Andrea Locatelli, and Katsuyuki Nakasuga, behind the regular EWC team of YART Yamaha and its trio of Marvin Fritz, Karel Hanika, and Leandro Mercado which will start fourth, and the Marc VDS KM99 Yamaha team in third.
Suzuki’s CN Challenge team, which has become a regular feature in the Experimental class in recent years, will start 13th with its line-up of Takuya Tsuda, Ryo Mizuno, and Etienne Masson.
Honda HRC has won the last four Suzuka 8 Hours races, but two-thirds of its line-up are new for this year with Rea and Chantra stepping in for the first time with HRC in its current form. Rea was victorious with Honda back in 2012, but hasn’t raced the 8 Hours since he won with Kawasaki in 2019, and this will be his first race at Suzuka with Honda since that 2012 edition when he rode for the FCC TSR team.
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Alex joined the Crash.net team in August of 2024 having covered consumer and racing motorcycle news at Visordown for two years.
