While it may seem hard to believe, Racing fans and anime fans have a decent amount of fan overlap. Many car enthusiasts can appreciate classic anime like “Wangan Midnight” and “Initial D”, and all the same, any anime fan who watched those shows, there is a huge intersection of motorsport fans and anime fans. This leads me to Itasha in motorsport. From a marketing standpoint, it is a great way to advertise a product or show to anyone watching the race, leading some cars to be strictly promotional, however some teams opt to permanently keep an anime livery. While it is extremely uncommon, there have been multiple cars that have competed in motorsport in the past 20 years that have had anime liveries and inspiration.

The first anime Livery in motorsport was good smile racing in 2008, featuring the popular vocaloid character “Hatsune miku”. Even today, goodsmile racing is still driving anime livery cars in the Japanese Super GT racing series in the GT300 class, even scoring 3 championships and is currently the second most successful team in their category. This is not the only series they have been to however, as in 2019 they collaborated with Mercedes-AMG Team Black Falcon to race 3 cars(one featured in the gif below, as rendered in Assetto Corsa Competizione) in the famous 24 Hours of Spa at the Spa-Franchcorps circuit in Belgium to compete. Goodsmile and Black Falcon were sucessful in this race too, with a 3rd place podium finish(pictured above), the first Itasha car to achieve a podium in the Intercontinental GT Challenge.

Goodsmile is far from the only team that have run anime liveries however, one example in the D1GP drift championship is Daigo Saito who in 2009 was sponsored by Weekly Comic Bunch. This is not limited to japan however as recently American series have seen anything from stickers to full liveries in their series. events like Nascar(pictured below), IMSA, Formula Drift, and even the pinacle of motorsport Formula 1 have all had their place on vehicles as simple sponsors, stickers, or even full wraps.