So, the winner of the 2009 D1 Grand Prix series is Yoichi Imamura.
To be honest, I was hoping that Tezuka would have won it, since he’s been driving so consistently well for the past few years, or at least Nomuken, since he deserves to win it by now.
There’s always next year.
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Wow, look at that entry by Tezuka. I’ve heard people say that the reason he can drive so well is because he has nothing between his ears.
I would have liked to go to Okayama, but it was a bit too far to drive, and I was entered in a practice day at Honjo Circuit the following day. More about that in another post.
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Congratulations Tsuyoshi Tezuka, winner of the 2009 D1GP Exhibition Round day two at Odaiba.
Second place Nomuken, third place Youichi Imamura.
More pics to come.
5 CommentsCongratulations Yoshinori Koguchi, winner of the 2009 D1GP Exhibition Round at Odaiba.
Koguchi’s car looks more like a red banana than a 180SX now, as he had a little t-bone accident with Kawabata, which he luckily came away from with just panel damage and drove through to win.
Second place was Masayoshi Tokita in the Goodyear Zero Crown, who drove the massive Toyota ridiculously well all day, skimming the foam block wall on almost every run with his police lights flashing, becoming the crowd favourite as a result.
On another note, sorry I haven’t been updating with longer posts recently. There’s been a lot of other work to do, and not enough time to go over pics I’ve taken for the site. Everything should be back to normal next week.
Until then, I’ll update the Twitter feed with anything interesting that happens tomorrow at D1!
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(photo: Copyright 2009 D1 CORPORATION All Rights Reserved)
Considering that I’m going to driving a lot at Ebisu Circuit next week at the Spring Drift Matsuri, I figured I’ve give travelling all the way down to Fukuoka to watch D1 a miss for this round.
That doesn’t mean I can’t still throw up some results! There are a lot of unknown faces ranking particularly well this round,
This is a list of all the unseeded drivers who have qualified to enter tomorrow’s second round of qualifying. Number one was SunRise’s Tetsuya Hibino in Toshiking’s old NOS-boosted naturally-aspirated AE86. It seems he’s added some bolt-on fenders for this round too, and it doesn’t look half bad!
1 25 Hibino Tetsuya AE86 DL 98.75
2 14 Kawabata Masato RPS13 TY 98.62
3 19 Takahashi Kuniaki JZX100 GY 97.50
4 28 Fujinaka Manabu FD3S YH 96.50
5 17 Minowa Shinji JZX90 DL 96.12
6 22 Yamashita Koichi JZX100 YH 95.62
7 23 Tanaka Kazuhiro GDB YH 95.00
8 21 Sakuma Tatsuya S15 TY 94.75
9 13 Utsumi Akira PS13 YH 94.25
10 20 Okamura Kazuyoshi S15 YH 94.25
11 31 Hayashi Wataru S15 DL 92.25
12 26 Nakamura Naoki S15 FD 90.37
13 35 Yamaguchi Osamu S14 YH 90.00
14 40 Ota Isao FD3S TY/FD 89.87
15 12 Suenaga Naoto CT9A YH 89.37
16 15 Tokita Masayoshi GRS180 GY 89.25
17 38 Kitashiba Michiyuki JZZ 30 YH 85.75
18 33 Hirano Tomokazu S15 YH 84. 50
19 27 Matsukawa Kazuya UZZ40 YH 82.75
20 18 Imamura (Drift Samurai) Takahiro FC3S TY 74.25
DL = Dunlop, GY = Goodyear, YH = Yokohama, TY = Toyo, FD = Federal
I’m almost sure those names are right, as some of the kanji were pretty hard to work out. Just out of interest, Takahiro Ueno’s new BMW didn’t qualify.
Click here for these results on the D1GP official site.
EDIT: Looks like the wet conditions gave a few of the drivers a bit of trouble, like Matsukawa here.
I rode in this car. Watch the video.
27 CommentsCongratulations Nomuken, winner of the 2009 D1GP Round 1 at Ebisu Circuit.
I really should crouch down when taking a photo of him though.
…and yes, that’s snow falling.
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Here’s some preview pics from today’s practice and qualifying at Ebisu Circuit.
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I’ve been going through more of the photos I took on some of my earlier trips to Japan, and there’s some fairly interesting stuff in there, like this little incident that happened at the first D1GP round I ever attended, at Ebisu Circuit in 2004.
Miki Ryuji, while trying to match Hibino’s ridiculous late-corner entry speed (Youtube video) ran a bit too wide and collided with the dirt wall.
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