🇧🇷 Kohei Hirate

Kohei Hirate is an established professional sportscar driver rated 5,383, placing him in the professional band; he holds FIA Platinum status for sportscar and endurance racing, the full professional grade at that level. His career spans 22 seasons from 2004 to 2025 across 183 starts, centred almost entirely on Super GT, where he has competed for Kondo Racing since 2008. He took the 2013 Super GT championship, his sole title. In single-seater racing earlier in his career he ran Formula 3 Euro Series from 2004 to 2006 for Manor Motorsport, achieving one win and six podiums across 34 starts, and completed a brief 13-race stint in the 2007 GP2 Series for Trident Racing with a single podium finish.[1]

His career head-to-head record reveals the calibre of driver he has typically faced: across 127 shared Super GT races with Tatsuya Kataoka and Nobuteru Taniguchi, both Gold and Silver professionals respectively, Hirate finished ahead consistently, winning those records 102–25 and 108–18. Against stronger opposition, however, the picture reversed markedly. In 123 races alongside Kazuya Oshima, the 2016 Super GT champion and a higher-rated Platinum professional, Hirate finished ahead only 47 times to 76 defeats. Likewise against Hiroaki Ishiura, another elite Platinum driver, he went 37 ahead to 84 behind across 121 shared races. His results against the strongest drivers he has encountered illustrate the gap: he finished ahead of Sebastian Vettel 13 times across their shared races and Alex Palou five times, but these remain isolated results against drivers rated more than a thousand points above him.

Super GT has been his dominant focus, accounting for 133 starts, 7 wins and 21 podiums from 2008 onward. His average finishing position across all 183 classified starts stands at 11.3, and his most recent activity in 2025 produced seven rounds without a podium, finishing 32nd. Recent reports indicate he announced a Super GT sabbatical in February 2026.