It happened right in front of me as I was watching the practice rounds. DrooP’s crew were still working hard on the car when I left earlier tonight, so I hope we see the car out there again tomorrow. The forecast calls for rain though!
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There’s lots of drifting to be seen at the Tokyo Auto Salon this weekend, and that includes Tetsuya Hibino’s new Toyota 86!
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To those who commented on the Facebook page and those who thought it couldn’t be done, here’s the video.
At a private Porsche-only drift school run by Ken Satoh from Mercury at Minami Chiba Circuit the other day, D1 driver Tetsuya Hibino took out one of the students’ cars to show how it’s done. I might add that this was only his second lap in this car!
ドライバーはＤ１選手ＳｕｎＲｉｓｅ日比野。
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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.
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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.
Part two of the Option2 x Mercury AE86 one-make race at Tsukuba.
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A while back when I took the Skyline to go drifting at Tsukuba Circuit, there was a series of AE86-only one-make races being held by Option2 magazine and Ken Satoh’s Mercury workshop on the same day. The drifting sessions were filling the dead time between races, which was the main event of the morning.
Naturally, there were a whole bunch of very quick hachis there competing in the roughly ten-minute races, running the gamut from expertly tuned and prepared to completely boro and awesome.
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Tetsuya Hibino’s character on D1 videos might be one of a rude, slang-talking tough guy, but in reality he’s anything but hard to talk to. That is, if you can understand his rapidfire “ittara” Nagoya accent and can keep up with his dictionary-like knowlege of the Toyota AE86 and how to drift it.
