A long, banked-camber left-hander that connects the back-section straight (after Spoon Curve) to the chicane. Modern F1 cars take 130R essentially flat-out, at approximately 305 km/h — but it has not always been so. In the pre-aero-revolution era of the 1960s-1980s, 130R was a genuine flat-out test of the driver: the corner's radius is fixed, the surface is camber-positive, and the apex speed depended entirely on the car's aerodynamic balance and the driver's confidence.
Until the 2003 season, 130R was a single long sweeper, taken at approximately 320 km/h by the fastest cars of the era. The corner was the site of Allan McNish's 2002 testing accident in a Toyota TF102 — McNish's car came around in the corner during practice for the Japanese GP, hit the inside barrier at very high speed, and McNish was uninjured but shaken. The Toyota team withdrew McNish from the rest of the meeting.
The 2003 reconfiguration split 130R into two parts:
130R Part 1 — A shorter initial sweep, still flat-out.
130R Part 2 — A second, tighter section that requires a small lift in some conditions.
The two parts share a single banked-camber surface and are negotiated as a single corner from the driver's perspective, but the apex line through the modified geometry is now in a slightly different place than the pre-2003 line. Drivers who raced the pre-2003 corner are split on whether the modification has improved or worsened the corner's character.
2002 — McNish's testing accident in the Toyota TF102 (mentioned above).
2005 — Kimi Räikkönen's legendary 2005 Japanese GP comeback, in which he passed Giancarlo Fisichella around the outside of 130R on the final lap to win the race, is one of the most-replayed overtakes in F1 history. The pass was on the outside of the corner, an extremely-rare line that requires the trailing car to commit to a higher apex speed than the leading car — a level of confidence and grip-margin that is uncharacteristic of modern F1 driving.
2014 — Driver concerns about wet-weather conditions at 130R contributed to the FIA's decision to maintain the Japanese GP under safety-car-led conditions during the Bianchi crash weekend at Dunlop Curve elsewhere on the circuit.
130R is one of the corners that defines what "the limit" looks like in modern F1. The fact that it is flat-out in dry conditions for top-spec cars — but only just — means it is the corner where a car's aero balance is most-revealed. A poorly-balanced car will lift; a well-balanced car will not. The qualifying lap-time difference between a Suzuka pole position and tenth place is determined in significant part by what the driver does through 130R.
130R is in Assetto Corsa's ks_suzuka (the post-2003 reconfiguration), ACC's suzuka (Intercontinental DLC), AMS2's Suzuka, and iRacing's suzuka/gp. The corner is one of the standard tests of a sim's tyre and aero model — the way the car balances through the sustained lateral load at 300+ km/h is a meaningful indicator of physics fidelity.