Only a small handful of drivers have represented all three of Japan’s biggest manufacturers in SUPER GT and its forerunner, the All-Japan GT Championship (JGTC), and of those, just one has won races in the top GT500 class with Toyota, Honda and Nissan.
It’s not any of the championship’s grandee drivers like Satoshi Motoyama, Yuji Tachikawa or Juichi Wakisaka. It’s not a driver who has had all that much success elsewhere, and not one who, even at the height of his powers in the mid-2000s, was especially well-known.
In fact, it’s little short of a miracle that Richard Lyons was even able to forge a career as a professional racing driver at all, given his humble origins and a chronic lack of funding that stifled his progress up the single-seater ladder before he moved to Japan in 2001.
And yet somehow, the Northern Irishman not only ended up winning races for Honda, Toyota and Nissan in JGTC/SUPER GT, he also entered that most exclusive club of drivers in Japanese…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Motorsport.com – All – Stories…