Motegi decommissions its speedway oval

Mobility Resort Motegi’s superspeedway oval, which gave the facility its original Twin Ring Motegi name, has been decommissioned – and will be repurposed as spectator seating and camping areas for future events.

Portions of the 1.5-mile asymmetrical oval will be covered with grass and transformed into a luxury spectator viewing deck on one end, and a camping site at the other end. These new sites will be completed in time for the MotoGP Japanese Grand Prix in October, with tickets for these areas already on sale.

Honda spent an estimated 38 billion yen ($241 million) to construct Twin Ring Motegi, which opened its doors in 1997. The new facility's paved superspeedway oval was the first of its kind ever constructed in Japan, over 30 years after the original plan for Fuji Speedway as a clone of Daytona fell through (for more reasons than the commonly-quoted lack of money), and 60 years after the construction of Tamagawa Speedway, a 3/4-mile dirt oval that was Japan’s first purpose-built racetrack, but would have felt more at home on the other side of the Pacific.

The first race around the Motegi oval took place later that year, when the All Japan Grand Touring Car Championship (known today as the Super GT Series) ran its annual All-Star Race there – with makeshift chicanes installed in the 10º banked turns.

That inaugural exhibition race was just a warm-up for what Motegi’s superspeedway was really built for. 55,000 fans came to watch the inaugural Indy Japan 500k on March 28, 1998, as the second round of the CART IndyCar Series (pictured, top). This landmark event would remain a fixture of the annual racing calendar for over a decade, though after Honda changed allegiances from CART to the Indy Racing League's IndyCar Series in 2003, it became an IRL event.

Outside of the inaugural running, the most notable chapter of the Indy Japan’s history happened in 2008, when Danica Patrick became the first woman to win a major American open-wheel race.

Danica Patrick claimed a breakthrough IndyCar win at Motegi in 2008. Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images

NASCAR also held two races around the Motegi oval – the first, a Cup Series exhibition race in 1998, and the second, a championship-deciding finale for the Winston West Series in 1999.

On March 11, 2011, Japan was devastated by the Great Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, which killed nearly 20,000 people and displaced over 300,000 more, due in part to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. During the earthquake, the surface of Motegi’s oval was heavily damaged and could not be repaired in time for what was already set to be the final IndyCar race in Japan later that year.

With no IndyCar or NASCAR events, no incentive remained for Honda and its subsidiary, Mobilityland Corporation, to invest the sort of money it would have taken to make the oval fit for racing again. Instead, only minimum maintenance was carried out as the oval became a parking lot for other major events. However, special demo runs would occasionally take place, such as during the 2017 Honda Racing Thanks Day fan festival, where Takuma Sato drove his Indianapolis 500-winning car around the oval at a leisurely speed.

The last of these one-off exhibition runs took place last Tuesday, when two of Honda’s GT500 championship-winning cars were brought out of the Honda Collection Hall for a “Sound Demonstration”. 2000 JGTC GT500 champion Ryo Michigami was reunited with his famous Castrol Mugen Honda NSX-GT, while Honda’s heritage test driver Hikaru Miyagi drove the 2010 title-winning Honda HSV-010 GT. ([https://.com/Ryo_Michigami/status/2051599917286932533]https://twitter.com/Ryo_Michigami/status/2051599917286932533)

In 2022, Honda Mobilityland changed the circuit’s name from “Twin Ring” Motegi to “Mobility Resort” Motegi, emphasizing the facility’s amusement park, campgrounds, and resort hotel while de-emphasizing the mostly-disused second “ring”.

Earlier this week, images were shared on social media capturing the oval’s protective catch fencing being torn down, thus marking the definitive end of an era at Mobility Resort Motegi.