Masahiko Kondo

Masahiko Kondō 2008

Masahiko Kondō ( Japanese 近藤 真 彦 , Kondō Masahiko ; born July 19, 1964 in Yokohama ) is a Japanese singer , actor , racing car driver and racing team owner.

Career

At the age of 15, Kondō, whose nickname in Japan is Matchy ( マ ッ チ , Matchi ) - a short form of his first name Masahiko - became a professional singer. With his first single, which immediately became number 1 in the Japanese charts, he broke all previous sales records. At 23, he won the Japanese Record Award and became a very popular singer in his home country. He performed every year between 1981 and 1988, and most recently in 1996 in Kōhaku Uta Gassen . He had his last big hit single with "Midnight Shuffle" in 1996, then he began to concentrate fully on his racing career. In 2005 he made a comeback as a musician and has since appeared on many Japanese television and music shows.

In the 1990s, Kondo was so popular that it could barely drive on public roads without being recognized. But since he was already interested in vehicles of all kinds, it made sense to drive in order to be able to move cars at all. This fact turned into an acceptable racing career in a short time.

In 1991 he entered the Japanese Formula 3 Championship and came to Europe for the first time in 1994 to take part in the Le Mans 24-hour race . He got into Formula Nippon via the Japanese Formula 3000 championship . It wasn't enough for a championship and at the end of the 1990s he shifted his activities to sports cars.

In 2001 he was a works driver for ORECA at Le Mans and drove its new prototype, the Chrysler LMP . Since 2000 he has been involved in the Super GT Championship with his own racing team, Kondō Racing, both as a driver and as a team boss .

statistics

Le Mans results

year	team	vehicle	Teammate	Teammate	placement	Failure reason
1994	Ada Engineering Ltd.	Porsche 962C GTI	Jun Harada	Tomiko Yoshikawa	not classified
1995	Nismo	Nissan Skyline GT-R LM	Hideo Fukuyama	Shunji Kasuya	Rank 10
1996	Nismo	Nissan Skyline GT-R LM	Aguri Suzuki	Masahiko Kageyama	Rank 18
2000	TV Ashai Team Dragon	Panoz LMP-1 Roadster S.	Keiichi Tsuchiya	Akira Iida	Rank 8
2001	Viper Team Oreca	Chrysler LMP	Seiji Ara	Ni Amorim	failure	Engine failure
2002	Kondō Racing	Dome S101	François Migault	Ian McKellar	failure	malfunction
2003	Kondō Racing	Dome S101	Ukyo Katayama	Ryō Fukuda	Rank 13

Web links

Commons : Masahiko Kondō  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Masahiko Kondō at Racing Sportd Cars