🇯🇵 Ryo Hirakawa

Ryo Hirakawa is an elite professional sportscar racer, rated 6,515; a Platinum-graded driver competing at the highest level of international endurance racing. His career has centred on the World Endurance Championship and Super GT, Japan's premier sportscar series, where he has won three championships: Super GT in 2017 and 2019, and the WEC Hypercar class in 2023. Across 94 race starts in multiple series, he has recorded 15 wins and 38 podiums, with an average finish of sixth across classified races. His record shows consistent form against peers at his level; he holds a near-even head-to-head against Yuhi Sekiguchi, a Gold-graded 2021 Super GT champion, and against Naoki Yamamoto, a multiple-time Super GT titleholder and Platinum driver. Against younger or lower-graded rivals in the same fields, Nobuteru Taniguchi, Tatsuya Kataoka, and Hironobu Yasuda, he has established clear dominance, consistently finishing ahead by large margins.[1]

Hirakawa's main platform has been Super GT, where he raced 54 times for TGR Team Keeper Tom's, winning seven races and taking 21 podiums across eight seasons ending in 2021. His WEC career began in 2016 and has spanned eleven seasons; 35 starts have yielded seven wins and 16 podiums, including a victory at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2022, his Hypercar debut year. Brief forays into single-seater racing, three Super Formula rounds in 2019 (one win) and one DTM appearance the same year, showed him capable in open-wheel competition but not his core discipline. His strongest singular results have come against drivers from other disciplines; he has beaten IndyCar multiple-champion Alex Palou eight times in shared competition, and holds a 28-win record against Sho Tsuboi, a three-time Super GT champion, though these records reflect the breadth of endurance fields rather than head-to-head regularity.[2]

In 2026, Hirakawa remains active in WEC and has taken a reserve-driver role at Haas F1 Team, including Friday practice outings in Formula 1. His recent results in the ongoing WEC season show continued competitiveness: one win and two podiums across four rounds to date.