Keizoku wa chikara nari – Persistence brings reward
Followers of Talk Motorsport are a breed above. They (we) know who Nick Cassidy is. We know how good he is. This month, Nick celebrated several remarkable milestones.
First up, on August 8 he took the lead in the Japan Super GT Championship in a factory-backed Lexus with co-driver Ryo Hirakawa. Superb.
Then ten days later he took the lead in the Super 500 single-seater series on the day he turned 24. Ah, the mid-20s, when all your faculties suddenly meld and you turn into superman!
Nick is everybody’s champion. See him in his street gear around the paddock at Manfeild and he’s another Kiwi motor racing enthusiast with maybe an interest in Japanese youth culture (them jeans!). He’s learning Japanese but his accent is still pure Kiwi (“you can take the boy out of Auckland” etc etc). The old guard know him, race fans often point him out, but if he walked down Queen Street in his trendy Tokyo-bought jeans and the team polo shirt he could pass without being delayed by the kind of fandom that follows him in Japan.
Annoying? Maybe. Ironic? Certainly. But Nick is living the life this year and has no need to fret over his Kiwi profile.
Multiple Toyota Racing Series champion, New Zealand Grand Prix winner 2012-2014, Japanese Formula 3 champion 2015, Japanese Super GT champion 2017. Deadly fast in European Formula three, where he was brought in to add consistency in Lance Stroll’s debut F3 year.
Cassidy is one of the most successful products of the Toyota Racing Series in its 14 year history, and his versatility behind the wheel was emphatically displayed last year when he shot to the forefront of both the Japanese Super GT and Super Formula Championships, mirroring the current situation.
Let’s pause and consider this for a moment: Super Formula is like TRS as imagined by some goose on meth: bigger tyres, massive power, massive aero. The cars have the same power as 2016 F1 cars and more downforce than the F1 cars of that year. And this guy, 23 years old at the time, is driving this Toyota-powered ‘wings and slicks’ single seater with 450kW up against a high quality field of drivers that included four from the exalted ranks of Formula One: Kazuki Nakajima, Andre Lotterer, Kamui Kobayashi and Pierre Gasly.
Not bad for a lad from Auckland who cut his teeth in the domestic karting scene at the tender age of six, with diversions into speedway and drove midgets at age eight.
Alongside those early steps, Cassidy started competing in full-sized open-wheelers: Formula First, where he was runner up (and rookie of the year) and then Formula 1600 where he was again runner-up and rookie of the year.
It was in 2011, though, that racing started to look like a career. Cassidy secured a Toyota Racing Series drive with Giles Motorsport team. He logged five podium finishes and then won two of the three races in the final weekend.
He was rookie of the year (again) and runner up (again), this time behind team-mate Mitch Evans.
Cassidy was all about versatility, grabbing drives wherever he could. He drove Formula 1600 in Australia, flew to Germany for the Formel Masters F3 championship and to Italy to race Formula Abarth. He also managed to cram in five races of the Fujitsu V8 Supercar Series, feeder category to the mighty Australian V8 Supercar Championship.
In 2012, Cassidy returned to Giles Motorsport and TRS. He was up against a field that included the fast but mercurial Hannes van Asseldonk, Ferrari Driver Academy’s Raffaele Marciello and Josh Hill, son of 2006 Formula One champion Damon Hill. Also racing were Gerhard Berger’s nephew Lucas “Luggi” Auer and British driver Jordan King. The 2012 TRS was a classic of its time. Drivers ranged in age from 16 (Shahaan Engineer and Victor Sendin) to 70 (New Zealand’s own Kenny Smith).
Cassidy demolished his opposition.
He won the most races (five), and set the highest number of fastest laps. He stood on the podium no less than ten times across the 15 race series. And when the series ended, he was almost 200 points clear of van Asseldonk, a driver many had tipped as a potential Formula One racer.
This year Cassidy is once more living in Japan to fulfil his racing and promotional duties for his dual factory-supported race drives. To have been invited to contest the two championships last year with Toyota and Lexus was a huge honour. To be confirmed for 2018 in the same roles is a full measure of the respect in which this young Kiwi is held.
As defending champion he knows he is a target for every other driver in the Super GT Championship and he is determined to go all the way in Super Formula.
As has been noted elsewhere on Talk Motorsport, he has now accrued enough SuperLicence points to gain admission to the vaunted heights of Formula One. Impossible? Never say never: he’s four and a bit years younger than Brendon Hartley. Nick would never be so silly as to say so, nor any of his quiet backroom of financial supporters, but we can muse on that for a while.
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