| Career Summary | Picture Index |
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| Last updated: 24-November-2001 | |
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1984-89
Top karter, winning Hong Kong and Japan Kart Grands Prix |
Born in Osaka on April Fools Day in 1971, Japanese driver Shinji Nakano (not to be confused with motorcycle racer Shinya Nakano) began his racing career at the tender age of 13. He competed in the Kansai Kartland AII Class Championship in 1984 and 1985, winning the title in both years. He then moved into the All Japan AII Class Championship in 1986, coming 9th, before improving to 2nd the next year.
1987 also saw young Shinji win the prestigious Hong Kong Kart Grand Prix, the youngest winner ever, as well as taking victory in the Japan Kart Grand Prix. However, in 1988, he slipped to 5th in the All Japan AII Class Championship, but was nonetheless on the move for 1989, graduating up to Japanese F3. For his first year in the class, he performed admirably to finish 7th overall. |
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1990-93
Moderate success in Europe, but he's soon back to Japan for F3 with Nakajima |
But to fulfil his high ambitions, he had to go to Europe, and in 1990 he did so. Racing in both the British Vauxhall Lotus championship and the GM Lotus Euroseries, he took a win at Silverstone and two 2nd places en route to 5th in the British series, but in Europe he only finished 17th overall. In 1991, he concentrated on the GM Lotus Euroseries, and joined Paul Stewart Racing, but could only finish 12th overall, his highlight being 3rd at Zolder.
Returning to Japan in 1992, he linked up with Satoru Nakajima, Japan's newly-retired F1 hero who had just set up his own team. Ambitiously, Nakajima fielded Nakano in both the Japanese F3 and F3000 championships. It was too much too soon, to the detriment of Shinji's efforts in both series. So for 1993, he wisely decided to concentrate on the F3 championship, joining Super Nova to drive their Dallara 393 Mugen Honda. |
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1993-95
With Mugen on his side, he joins DOME for Japanese F3000 but it's tough going |
With seven top-five finishes, three 2nd places and one pole position, Nakano came 5th overall with 26 points, a vast improvement. In the Formula 3 Super Cup event, he took 2nd place. By now he had the support of Hirotoshita Honda, the boss of Mugen Honda, and not surprisingly in 1994 he moved to Shion Mugen Racing, hoping to take out the Japanese F3 crown in their Dallara 393 Mugen Honda.
Unfortunately with only one pole, one win at Suzuka and 5 podium finishes, Nakano could manage no better than 3rd with 33 points. But with Mugen's support, in 1995 Nakano returned to Japanese F3000, replacing Marco Apicella in the championship-winning DOME team, to drive the DOME F104 Mugen. But like his original stint in the category in 1992, Shinji found the going tough. His best was a 3rd place at Sugo, and his only other points finish was a 5th. With these results he ended up 11th overall. |
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1996
Test DOME F1 prototype while finishing 6th overall in FNippon |
1996 saw Nakano remain with DOME, and with a revised F104i chassis coupled to a Mugen engine, he showed improved consistency, finishing all ten rounds in the top 10. He managed 2nds at Suzuka and Mine, and 3rd at Fuji, but with 20 points he was only 6th overall, behind champion Ralf Schumacher, Naoki Hattori, Kazuyoshi Hoshino, Toranosuke Takagi and Norberto Fontana. That year, DOME was also seriously planning an F1 project in conjunction with Mugen. They built a prototype chassis and did extensive testing with Apicella, Hattori and at times Nakano behind the wheel. However the plan came to nought in the end, and Mugen began to look elsewhere to try to get their man Shinji into a Formula One seat for 1997. |
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1997 Prost Mugen connections help land Shinji in F1, but the Prof prefers Panis |
Where better to look than the team to which Mugen were supplying engines? Just before the start of the 1997 season, Alain Prost bought the Ligier team, taking over the already-designed JS45 chassis and their Mugen engine supply, and signed a tyre deal with newcomers Bridgestone. Having lost driver Pedro Diniz to Arrows, there was a vacancy alongside Olivier Panis. Put two and two together, and Mugen ensured that it was Nakano in the second Prost at season's start.
Throughout his ill-fated five years as a team boss, Prost has always shown a preference for talented drivers over those present at the behest of sponsors and suppliers. That precedent was set right from the start. Angry that Mugen had pressured him into taking Nakano, who admittedly had had little on his CV thus far, Prost virtually ignored him at the start of the season. It showed, with Shinji qualifying as low as 21st out of 22 at Monaco, and looking a fair way out of his depth. |
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1997
Panis suffers in Canada as Nakano picks up a point |
Prost probably had some reason to feel that way. The JS45 was an excellent car, the Bridgestone tyres could sometimes be amazing, and Panis finished 3rd in Brazil, should have won in Argentina, and came 2nd in Spain. But in Canada, the Frenchman crashed violently and broke both his legs. With Panis out of action, Prost brought in Jarno Trulli to partner Nakano, and with two rookie drivers in the team, and Mugen standing firm behind Shinji, Alain had no choice but to give Nakano a helping hand.
Incidentally, Nakano had qualified 19th in Canada, and as a result of Panis' accident and the fact that David Coulthard's McLaren was stuck in the pits, he happened to be in 6th place when the race was stopped. As a result, he rather fortuitously scored his first World Championship point. But with his boss paying him more attention after that, Shinji's performances picked up markedly. In France he would qualify a career-best 12th, and after that started every race from either 15th, 16th or 17th spot. |
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1997
Rams Irvine for another point, but homeless at season's end |
In races he tended to drive steadily and reliably, with the occasional spin and a few engine failures bringing most of his retirements. He ran 6th in Britain until his engine blew a few laps from home, handing Damon Hill's Arrows the last point. He was then a fine 7th in Germany, but in Hungary, on the last lap Ralf Schumacher, Eddie Irvine and himself were following Michael Schumacher closely when a concertina effect under braking saw Nakano ram Irvine off and shamelessly collect another point for 6th.
With those two points, Nakano finished equal 16th in the World Championship. Autosport in its end-of-season review described Nakano as a driver who deserved a second chance, and there was some truth in that. Once Prost had begun helping him to find his feet, he showed that he was by no means as out of place in F1 as it had originally seemed. But come 1998, with Panis back and Trulli also on the books, not to mention a new engine deal with Peugeot, Shinji was given the boot. |
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1998 Minardi Finds a spot at the back of the grid alongside Tuero and the Tyrrells |
For 1998, the Mugen Honda engine deal had gone to Jordan, but they had already signed Hill to join the younger Schumacher, so there was no place for Nakano there. In the end, his connections and his sponsorship from the Avex Group landed him a seat at Minardi alongside Esteban Tuero. But with the Italian team struggling for funds, and finding it hard to extract enough power out of their Ford Zetec R V10 engines, it was always going to be an uncompetitive year for the two drivers.
Accordingly, in a seriously unspectacular year, Nakano only managed to lift himself out of the bottom 4 on the grid twice, when he qualified 18th in Brazil and Canada. Otherwise he was firmly entrenched at the back, along with his team-mate and the equally powerless Tyrrells. In races, despite the odd mechanical failure, especially from engine problems, Shinji once again showed himself to be a reliable, safe driver, finishing 9th at Monaco, 8th at Silverstone and Spa, and 7th in Canada. |
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Hear Murray Walker spluttering in surprise at Nakano's race position .
"Here is Magnussen, fourth. Panis is fifth, behind Panis is Nakano in the Minardi. Behind Nakan-ab-lybb-elybb-er Nakano, is Wurz, and behind Wurz is Eddie Irvine." |
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1998
Runs well in Canada, but Fisi rams him in the rain at Spa |
His two memorable moments of the season did indeed come from those two races at Spa and Montreal. In Canada, after a spate of incidents, he found himself in 6th place, ensconced in a battle for 4th behind Jan Magnussen and Panis, but ahead of Alexander Wurz and Irvine. For several laps, Wurz and Irvine could find no way past the Minardi. Eventually they did, but Nakano still soldiered on to finish 7th, although many neutral observers would say he deserved to score a point that day.
At Spa he found himself caught up in the first start pile-up, but he took the spare car for the restart. As the rain continued to fall, late in the race he was hit up the back by an unsighted Giancarlo Fisichella in an accident of ferocious force. Nakano limped into the pits, and continued after getting a new rear wing. But at season's end, with Fondmetal taking a stake in Minardi, the Italian team shifted its attentions back to Europe, and once again Nakano found himself out in the cold. |
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1999
Takes up test duties with Mugen powered Jordan helping in the WCC |
Jordan continued with their Mugen supply for 1999, but with Heinz-Harald Frentzen joining Hill, there was still nowhere for Nakano to go. In the end, the best Mugen could do for Shinji was to get him a few testing duties with the Silverstone team. Whilst he didn't do a great deal of work for them, he could claim to have made a small contribution to a year in which Frentzen and Jordan took 3rd in the drivers' and constructors' championships.
1999 was, of course, the year of Hill's on-off retirement saga. At one stage, when it looked as though the 1996 World Champion would not see out the season, Eddie Jordan tried unsuccessfully to secure Trulli's release from Prost, and tested Jos Verstappen but found The Boss a disappointment. Had Hill decided to call it quits before season's end, it was not unforeseeable that Nakano may have got the nod. It would have been interesting to see how he would have gone in a competitive car. |
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2000
Great CART debut is followed by a nasty crash at Milwaukee |
Anyway, by 2000 Nakano and his Mugen Honda associates were looking Stateside. As Dan Wildhirt informed us, Nakano landed a drive in the FedEx Champ Car series with Derrick Walker's team, in a Reynard with Honda engines and Avex sponsorship. After a brilliant 8th place on debut at Homestead, he then suffered a nasty crash in testing at Milwaukee. Sustaining several small brain contusions, he was forced to sit out three rounds at Long Beach, Rio and Nazareth.
When he returned, he found the rest of his season littered with mechanical failures. In total, he would only finish five races all year, although three of those were in the points-paying top 12. Adding to his 8th at Homestead, he came 8th again on the streets of Houston. Eventually, with 12 points, he was 24th overall, and 5th in the Rookie of the Year standings. |
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2001
Signs with Fernandez, but points are few and far between |
For 2001, Nakano signed a two-year deal with the new team formed by owner-driver Adrian Fernandez, bringing his Honda engines with him, and once again using a Reynard chassis. Despite being very quick and impressive in testing, it was always going to be tough for a new team to get to grips with the demands of the Champ Car schedule, let alone a new two-car team. It showed, as Fernandez slipped from 2nd in 2000 with 158 points down to 18th in 2001 with only 45 points.
For Nakano, once again he drove respectably if not always all that quickly, but towards the end of the season again suffered from mechanical problems. He scored points for 12th at Long Beach and Surfer's Paradise, 9th at Toronto, and 8th at Motegi. Overall, though, he slipped to 26th place in the championship with those 11 points attained. On a personal note, Nakano is 1.74 metres tall and weighs in at 68kg. |
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