Miki Koyama

Mihime “Miki“ Koyama races in Formula 4 in Japan. She was also the 2017 champion in the women-only Kyojo Cup.

Miki was 18 when she first started racing cars, although she raced karts both at home in Japan and abroad from the age of five, between 2003 and 2013. 2015 was her debut season in Formula 4, following a driver training programme. She entered the last four races of the year. Her best finishes were at Motegi, but were only two 26th places.

In 2016, she was set to race full-time in Formula 4, driving for the miNami aoYama Project, but this did not happen, and she only made five appearances from 14 rounds. Her best result was an eleventh place, at Okayama. One of her team-mates was Ayaka Imahashi, another young female driver.

She did a full season of Formula 4 in 2017 but struggled. Her best finish was 18th, at Autopolis. She was unplaced in the championship. Mid-season, she contested the two rounds of the inaugural Kyojo Cup at Fuji, driving a VITA-01 sports prototype. She won both races and was crowned the champion when the third round was abandoned due to a typhoon.

This was not her first experience of sportscar racing; she took part in some rounds of the 2016 Interproto Series, earning one third place. This is a one-make sportscar series like the Kyojo Cup that uses the “Kuruma”, a spec car.

In 2017, she did more one-make racing in the Honda N-One Owners Cup, which uses the N-One supercompact. Miki participated in five races and won two. Staying with Honda, she made a guest appearance in the FIT Challenge Cup, another one-make series.

For Miki, 2018 was split again between Formula 4, the Kyojo Cup and guest spots in Japanese sportscar series. This year, she did her first 24-hour race in June. She was third in the Super Taikyu 24 Hours at Fuji, as part of a six-driver team in a Toyota GT86.

In Formula 4, she drove for the Field Motorsports team and was 15th overall. It was her best season to date and included three top-ten finishes: a seventh and two ninths at Fuji. The series had big entries of more than 20 cars per race.

She won three rounds of the Kyojo Cup and retained her title in 2018, despite having a disaster in the last round and only finishing eighth.

Miki jumped ship from one all-female championship to another in 2019, moving to Europe to contest the inaugural W Series. She was praised by observers for her overtaking abilities, but she could not quite get onto the podium, finishing fourth once at Misano. She was seventh overall.

It was a busy year for Miki domestically too. She entered most of the Japanese F4 championship, earning three top-ten finishes, and also raced F3 cars in the Asian Championship. She was fourteenth overall after a part-season of six races at Chang and Suzuka, with a best finish of seventh at Suzuka.

W Series was cancelled in 2020 due to coronavirus. Miki started the year with three races in the F3 Asian Championship at Sepang and finished tenth twice and ninth once. In May, she drove for Zap Speed in the Formula Regional Japanese Championship, which uses the same car as W Series. She was fifth and seventh at Fuji.

Her second W Series season was a let-down after her early promise in 2019. She was fifth in the first race at the Red Bull Ring, but languished just outside the top ten for most of the rest of the season. She was fourteenth in the championship and was not invited back in 2022.

Before getting into her W car, she made a guest appearance at the first Super Formula Lights series meeting of the year, held at Fuji. She was seventh twice and eighth once, driving for B-Max Engineering.

Miki managed to prove her detractors at W Series wrong in 2022. She entered the Formula Regional Japan series for the Super License team and soon became the dominant driver in the championship. Her winning streak began at the second meeting at Okayama and she won seven of the 17 races, finishing either second or third in the others. She won the championship by a large margin.

In a change of direction, most of 2023 was spent preparing for and competing in the Super GT championship in Japan, the first female driver to do so for more than a decade. She was signed as a third driver by the Anest Iwata Racing team, driving a Lexus RC F GT3, which runs in the GT300 class. Her co-drivers were Igor Fraga and Yuga Furutani. Her first race gave her a 19th place in class, but she improved to eleventh by the end of the year. At the end of the season, she also made a guest appearance in the F4 race at Macau, but she could only finish one of her races in eleventh.

(Image from https://ameblo.jp/mk-gold1/entry-12312181855.html)