Two decades ago this month, Firman scored his first and only F1 point with an eighth-place finish in the Spanish Grand Prix. It turned out to be the high point of a tough campaign with Jordan, which by now was in its death throes ahead of being purchased by the Midland Group in early 2005.
Fast forward a little over a decade, and Firman clinched his 12th and final Super GT victory at Sugo. That year, the British driver with an Irish licence elected to call time on a career that yielded title honours in both Formula Nippon (now Super Formula) and Super GT.
Indeed, while Firman is best known for his brief Jordan stint, from 1997 until his retirement, almost his entire career was spent in Japan - besides the year in F1, only in 2004 and 2011 was he not racing in either of the country’s two top series before hanging up his helmet. When he did call it quits, Firman did so as Super GT’s joint-most successful ‘gaijin’ driver in terms of wins, and only the third from overseas to triumph in both the sportscar series and in Formula Nippon after Pedro de la Rosa in 1997 and Richard Lyons in 2004. With a little more luck, he could have been at least a three-time champion in JGTC/Super GT.
It’s a shame, therefore, that Firman’s illustrious career in the Land of the Rising Sun hasn’t been documented, at least in English, as well as it might have been.
“At the time there wasn’t much press coverage of Japanese racing in Europe, so that is probably why hasn’t been much written about it,” Firman says as he prepares to shed some light on his six seasons in Formula Nippon and 10 in the top class of JGTC/Super GT.
We begin the story in early 1997, as Firman searches for options to move up the single-seater ladder off the back of his British Formula 3 title and subsequent Macau Grand Prix win. In the end, the decision was made to try Formula Nippon, very much still in vogue in Europe at the time after Ralf Schumacher’s title the previous year, with Team TMS.
“Budgets were quite steep in Formula 3000, but I could get paid to race in Japan and it was established that you could get back to Europe at the time, so it felt like a good path to try,” recalls Firman. “The team was fairly inexperienced, and they certainly weren’t a top team. It all happened quite late, I didn’t look at Japan until way after Macau, and the top teams were all full.
“We had Paul Crosby come and help engineer the cars, he was a very experienced Formula 3000 engineer in Europe, we brought him on after a few races and it was great to have him come over. We started getting good results after that.”
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Source: Autosport