Five things to know ahead of the Japanese Grand Prix

With the Japanese GP coming in the later stages of the season, Suzuka is the spot where many F1 drivers and teams have marked their title-winning races.

Max Verstappen clinched the championship after last year's soggy Sunday, but that's just one of a dozen championship-winning drives around the Japanese circuit — not to mention the eight constructors' titles won here.

Nelson Piquet scored his third and final title here in the FW11B, Damon Hill's 1996 Williams Racing win secured his only World Drivers' Championship trophy, and we grabbed the 1997 World Constructors' Championship here after Heinz-Harald Frentzen's P2 finish.

Suzuka is a Honda-owned race track, but two of its more challenging corners — Degner 1 and Degner 2 — have their names in memory of a legend from another Japanese manufacturer.

German motorbike rider Ernst Degner defected from East Germany in the 1960s with the help of Suzuki and helped the company develop their bikes.

Degner suffered a heavy crash at the circuit in the 1963 250cc Japanese Grand Prix, requiring over 50 skin grafts, but he still recovered to race in subsequent years, winning four more events before retiring.

His name famously lives on with the two right-hand corners that precede the cross-under point of the circuit.

You may remember we were racing around the steep banking of Hugenholtz corner in Zandvoort a few weeks ago in the 2023 Dutch GP.

The corner is named after John Hugenholtz, the old director of the Zandvoort circuit and the Dutchman also designed many race tracks across the globe, including Suzuka in 1962.

Suzuka is well-known for its figure-of-eight layout, with the circuit crisscrossing over itself. However, Hugenholtz's first designs had three crossover points before settling on the configuration we now know and love.

Suzuka will hold fond memories for Nicky after his herculean effort to keep his intermediate tyres performing for 23 laps last year.

The heavy rain caused a 40-minute red-flag period, and our strategy team brought the Canadian into the pits to swap out his wet-weather tyres, and he leapfrogged up to P8 in the order.

Nicky eventually finished P9 to take home two points for his and our championship tally, crossing the line 10 positions higher than his starting grid slot.

Before Formula 1 grew into the global tour it is today, with multiple races on most continents, Japan represented the only Grand Prix on Asian soil.

The country had Fuji Speedway and Okayama hosting F1 races in the past, but it took until the 1999 Malaysian GP before F1 raced elsewhere in the region.

Since then, we've also had the Chinese GP, Korean GP, Indian GP, and Singapore GP join Japan and Malaysia as stops on the calendar, with the Azerbaijan GP also representing the continent... despite its original moniker as the "European GP".