In September 2023 my wife and I traveled to our first F1 Grand Prix, at Suzuka, Japan. Having followed F1 for a long time, I’d dreamt of attending the Japanese Grand Prix and was elated to finally have the opportunity to do it in 2023. This is a summary of the trip and tips for those considering attending a GP at Suzuka.

Views from Q2 seating section

Accommodation & travel

I recommend planning your travel well in advance. We started looking at flights and hotels about 7 months before the GP, well before tickets were available. Then jumped on the tickets as soon as they opened sales because we wanted to sit in a specific seating.

We stayed in Nagoya, close to the train station for easy access to transportation and the variety of food options available at the Nagoya station. Many (5?) months before the race we booked a room at the Daiwa Roynet Nagoya Taiko Dori side. It was very easy to find, clean, inexpensive, and in a great location about a 5 minute walk to the station. Rooms are quite small like in so many Japanese hotels :) When we arrived in Nagoya on the train from the airport, we didn’t realize we’d been deposited in the Meitetsu train station, which is not the same as the JR station - it’s a separate but adjacent building. We exited the station and walked outside to the hotel but later realized we could have entered the JR station to walk through it (because our hotel was on the other side of the station from where we arrived).

Transportation

Numerous Reddit threads on r/GrandPrixTravel on the pros and cons of the various modes of transporation helped a ton with planning how to get to the circuit. We didn’t seriously consider private car transportation but if you are with a group, it could be economical to do that (and perhaps a little quicker since you don’t have to wait in train station queues, but then you do have to deal with car traffic).

We took public transportation to/from Nagoya and Suzuka Ino station (NOT Suzuka station, which is a different station). Suzuka Ino station is about a 20-30 minute walk from the track. We decided not to go from Nagoya to Shiroko Station (the route recommended by the Suzuka Circuit website), because we’d heard about the queue to board the shuttles that go between the station and the track. Perhaps you can get lucky and can board a shuttle bus quickly, but if not, we understood the wait to board the shuttle bus to be up to 2 hours, or the walk from that station to the track is about an hour. That said, one of my friends used the shuttle bus and reported that, while slow, everything was very orderly.

Suzuka Ino station is operated by the Ise Railway company, not by the JR railway. This means that, coming from Nagoya JR station, you’ll embark on a JR train at a JR station and disembark from that train at a different company’s station (Suzuka Ino). This may have implications for your ticket purchase and price; see the next section about ticket purchase. The Suzuka Circuit site has a handy map that highlights the important stations relevant to visiting the track. Generally speaking, it seems trains are of types limited express (fastest), express, and local.

From Nagoya to Suzuka Circuit and round-trip ticket purchase

On Saturday (we didn’t attend any events on Friday), just as we walked up to a ticket machine at Nagoya station, we met a friendly local fan who’d just purchased his own ticket to the circuit and he helped us purchase ours. We purchased a round-trip, discounted ticket for a destination one station further than Suzuka Ino, and explained that there’s a discount for purchasing this one instead of one that only goes to Suzuka Ino. He also said that when we disembarked at Suzuka Ino station we’d have to pay a difference fee due to the nature of this ticket. The price for one day of round-trip tickets for two people was JPY 3160.

The person who helped us purchase the ticket then led us to the right platform (#12) and pointed us to the place to queue, but then headed for another part of the platform because he had purchased a seat reservation. Since we didn’t have a reserved seat, our strategy was to line up and just get the next available train, regardless of it being an express/limited/local/whatever train. If you really want to sit, you may consider not boarding a packed train to instead wait for the next one, but without a seat reservation it still won’t be guaranteed.

When we arrived at Suzuka Ino station, we queued for the fare adjustment, which took about 10 mins. But when we showed our ticket to the train station staff, we were told we didn’t have to pay any extra fee and they waved us through. So on Sunday when we disembarked at Suzuka Ino station, we skipped the fare adjustment queue and went straight to the regular exit queue, and that worked out fine.

The timing of our travel on Saturday was roughly:

• 07:55am: arrive at Nagoya station
• 08:10am: join queue for train to Suzuka.
• 08:37am: boarded the (express?) train bound for Toba and luckily got to sit down; it was pretty packed with lots of people standing

• 09:40am: arrived at Suzuka Ino station
• 10:05am: entered the circuit through the Turn 1 gate

From Suzuka Circuit to Nagoya

On Saturday we left just after FP3 ended and walked swiftly back to Suzuka Ino station. We arrived at the end of the queues leading to the station just before 5pm. Since we already had purchased our return ticket in the morning, we skipped the line to purchase tickets and got straight into the queue for Nagoya. The train staff arranges the queues in long, parallel “columns” of people and empty each column in a FIFO fashion as trains arrive at the station. Unless you want to wait for a specific train, you’ll want to just get on the train that’s on the platform at the time your queue-column is allowed to get onto the platform and board a train. Ours was not a direct train to Nagoya and we had to transfer at Yokkaichi where the wait for the follow-on train to Nagoya was about 10 mins. Perhaps 99% of passengers were doing the same so it was easy to follow the crowd.

The timing of our travel on Saturday returning to Nagoya was:

• 4:57pm: arrived at Suzuka Ino queue
• 5:29pm: boarded the train
• ~7:00pm: arrived at Nagoya station

Seats

Our seats overlooked the final chicane, in section Q2 > J11. Here we could see the final approach to the chicane, the pit entry, and almost all of the final corner. A bonus was that we could see cars exiting turn 2 (though they were at quite a distance) and along the short straight leading to the first Degner curve. The elevation of most Q2 seats gives a glimpse of many of the grandstands between the turn 2 and the S curves, and even the blue waters of Ise Bay beyond Suzuka. There were a few overtakes and more attempted ones at the chicane, but I expected to see more. Many drivers probably didn’t need to make an aggressive move at the chicane because if they were close enough to try to pass, they could instead wait to get DRS down the main straight and pass much more easily. It made me wonder how DRS has changed overtaking in general but I digress.

F1 fan zone

The enthusiasm of the fans, many dressed with creative hats or vintage uniforms, was infectuous and really added to the spirit of the event. This isn’t limited to the fan zone of course but many of them are gather there to meet people, take photos, and some are interviewed by the media.

There’s lots of merch available for sale here. The popular teams dominated the supply and I’m not sure if that’s because of the outsized popularity of Honda and/or Red Bull + Alpha Tauri. But there wasn’t nearly as much merch for Alfa, Alpine, Haas, and the less popular drivers/teams.

From the fan zone you can easily access a few of the amusement park-style rides such as the motorcycle coaster (called “GP Racers”) and single-track electric cars (called “Duel GP”). When we checked them, the estimated waiting time in the queue was 85 minutes for the coaster ride and 30 minutes for the electric cars.

Following the action

To state the obvious: the cars are loud! I didn’t feel like I needed earplugs, although sometimes it was hard to talk to the person next to me because of the engine noise. I can only imagine what it must have been like to attend a race during the V10 or V12 era!

There’s a lot to follow. At first all the cars are bunched up but as the race goes on, they spread out a lot; if you are following the big TV screen to keep an eye on what’s happening and keeping an eye on the cars going past your field of vision, there will be a lot to follow! My neck was craning by the end like on a swivel

It was helpful to pull up the F1 app and follow the live timing, especially during qualifying when the order chnages frequently. While we were sitting across from a TV screen, it was a bit hard to read the text including the driver names on the left.

We learned there is an English (and Japanese) commentary broadcast by a local FM station: Suzuka Voice FM. You’ll need to bring an FM radio that tunes to 78.3 MHz (or 86.0 MHz as I read elsewhere), which likely means a Japanese market radio or a multi-band/shortwave radio with that coverage. You’ll also want earphones with good noise isolation or cancellation because otherwise you won’t be able to hear the radio over the noise of the racing. We didn’t get the chance to get an FM radio, but we would try to get one next time.

Another obvious one, but if you are sitting in an area that may have action, pay attention! You can’t rely on the TV director to focus on the action for you, so if something happens within your field of view, you need to have been looking in that direction before it happens. I missed seeing one or two attempted overtakes at the chicane.

General tips

There are food stands throughout, so unless you are set on something very specific like a Sasebo burger, you can probably keep walking and find other food with shorter lines. In general when you see long lines for food or bathroom, it’s probably easier to walk somewhere else. One men’s bathroom I saw had a queue of 40+ people, but the next bathroom over (about 50m away) had a queue of about 5.

Also there are some vendors near the Turn 1 gate entrance that sell delicious treats and are less crowded than most other areas. Saturday morning, on a whim we tried a sweet bean paste treat made by a local vendor from Suzuka City, Obaraki Honpo Daitokuya, that has been in business for over 300 years. It was so delicious that on Sunday we bought 3 more :)

There are drink stations where you can refill your water bottle from a tap. Keep an eye out for them because they are not very tall and can be easy to miss (they are blue).

Prepare for weather! Naturally this season-dependent but we needed to be ready for rain and sun. On parts of Saturday and Sunday it was pretty hot and many people were parked under shade whever they could find it. A perhaps overlooked area with lots of shade is the back or exit area of the Racing Theater. If it’s sunny you will probably need to reapply sunscreen once or twice. Some people without sun cover looked like they were having a miserable time :(

Enjoy! The race seemed to go by pretty quickly; before we knew it, Max was taking the chequered flag.

Summary

Overall the experience at Suzuka was fantastic. It’s such a beautiful and iconic track, the fans are passionate, the ammenities are great, everything is super well-organized…we were really happy with the whole event. Some F1 fans have told me that attending a race is a bit underwhelming because you can’t follow the action very well, don’t have context from commentary + action on other parts of the track, and it’s harder to really track how one car is doing, etc. Perhaps it can be a bit underwhelming if you’re a fan of a single or few drivers or if you’re sitting at the middle of a long straight with cars mostly just zooming past at 200+ MPH. But overall I thought the experience was fantastic. F1 coverage on TV and with all the technology is pretty great these days, but we felt like there’s nothing quite like hearing the sound of an F1 car, at speed, and in person. To us this was perhaps the most impressive part - just how different it is in real life, and it was incredible.