VENUS CHALLENGER: Drift girl Saori Ishikawa

For this year’s D1SL season, D1 Corporation has started a separate parallel series just for girl drifters called the “Venus Challenge”.

The name might sound a bit silly, but the driving skills at the pointy end of the field are not.

I’ll have more on that in another post, but when I put up some stuff about Hibino yesterday, it reminded me to put up some pics of one of the Venus Challenge drivers in particular.

This is Saori Ishikawa holding her mascot sticker. After showing a bit of talent driving her personal S13 Onevia in the D1SL series, Hibino decided to take Saori on as a protégé! For this season, Saori is driving an S14 built by SunRise.

Saori’s nickname in Japanese means “apple”, which explains these stickers. The mascot’s racing suit is identical to the real thing too, and they hired a professional manga artist to design it.

Not the best photo, but you get the idea! This was at the Venus Challenge demo runs at the recent Odaiba D1GP.

Last year, Saori drove this Gallery x Yashio Factory collaboration 180SX. Here it is at Maze Circuit.

Wait a minute. I’ve seen this pose before. Who have I seen do this pose before?

このポーズは見たことあるかな。

I knew it. Hibino has been teaching her PR skills as well as driving skills!

やっぱりな。日比野だ。

Saori is currently ranked first on the D1SL Venus Challenge leaderboard and looks like a pretty strong challenger for the overall championship.

I’ll put up another post next week about some more of the Venus Challenge competitors.

Categorised in: Profiles　プロフィル

This post was written by Alexi