With how Umamusume has taken the world by storm, it seemed inevitable that the franchise based on horse racing would cross over with motorsports.

On Friday, Pacific Racing Team unveiled a new collaboration with Umamusume: Pretty Derby for the 2026 Super GT season. As part of the promotion, six characters—series protagonist Special Week, Buena Vista, Maruzensky, Curren Chan, Rice Shower, and Winning Ticket—will appear on the team’s BMW M4 GT3 EVO and serve as ambassadors.

Umamusume is a multimedia project about real-life racehorses personified as horse girls. While the franchise was already popular domestically in Japan, it exploded overseas following the mobile game’s global release last summer. Multiple anime series have also been produced as well as manga and live concerts.

The idea of turning something into an anime girl is far from novel (such as Kantai Collection and Azur Lane with naval ships), though those familiar with Japanese horse racing have praised Umamusume for incorporating elements of the sport’s history into the story. For example, the real Maruzensky was nicknamed “Supercar” for dominating races in the 1970s, which was worked into the umamusume by making her the owner of such a car. Of course, this also meant she was a natural choice for collaborating with an auto racing team.

The real-life counterparts of all six collab characters come from the same lineage: Special Week, Rice Shower, and Winning Ticket were the grandchildren of Maruzensky, while Curren Chan and Buena Vista are his great-grandchildren and the latter was sired by Special Week. Since they are schoolgirls of roughly the same age range in the Umaverse, the familial connections are typically depicted as them being good friends or dropped entirely.

Cygames frequently uses Umamusume as sponsorship activation at horse races in Japan, the rest of Asia, and the United States. For example, the Breeders’ Cup Sprint is officially called the Cygames Sprint while the iconic Kentucky Derby was backed by the company in 2025. Pacific wouldn’t be the project’s first automotive partnership either as the Cinderella Gray spin-off anime collaborated with Autobacs in November.

Like GT300 classmate Goodsmile Racing with Hatsune Miku, Pacific Racing is known as the itasha team in Super GT because of their anime liveries. Other IPs the team has worked with include Love Live!, Girls und Panzer, The Idolmaster, and Hololive.

Featured image credit: Pacific Racing Team