Listen to this article The #36 car of Sho Tsuboi and GT500 rookie Giuliano Alesi came home sixth despite dominating much of official pre-season testing, while the sister #37 machine duo of Sacha Fenestraz and Ritomo Miyata fared even worse, ending up a point-less 11th. Read Also: On the #36 side of the garage, it was always clear that Alesi was going to be up against it on his first GT500 start. He may have had 10 days of pre-season testing to get used to the GR Supra, including four days at Okayama, with the advantage of working with largely the same group of people at TOM’S he’d become familiar with in Super Formula last year, but he never looked like matching the scorching pace of reigning champion Tsuboi. In the official Okayama pre-season test, Alesi’s best lap was around one second down on Tsuboi’s, and in free practice on Saturday – for which Alesi took the wheel for the final 10 minutes of GT500-only running – the deficit was a little under eight tenths. Tsuboi was at the wheel for Q1, topping the segment with a 1m17.177s, a time good enough for pole had it been replicated in Q2. Alesi didn’t disgrace himself in the pole shootout with a 1m17.834s to go sixth, but it vindicated the team’s choice to play it safe by putting Tsuboi in the car for Q1 and sacrifice a shot at pole in the process. Alesi unsurprisingly took the start in the #36 car, but far from making progress, he lost out to Bertrand Baguette’s Impul Nissan on the opening lap and then spent the rest of his 31-lap stin …