Here’s one from back when Koguchi was campaigning a JZX100 Chaser in D1SL.
Right at the end of the qualifying and practice day at Sugo Speedway, he managed to break the left rear suspension on the second corner. Since it was close to the end of the day, there was no time to send out a recovery truck, so he just parked it on the grass, hopped the fence and walked back to the pits!
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This weekend, my local Super Autobacs is having an opening anniversary event. Daigo Saito, Yoshinori Koguchi and D1 commentator Manabu “Mana-P” Suzuki will be there, so I would have liked to go and take some pics since I could practically walk there, but I’ll be somewhere else this weekend!
To make up for it, here’s a pic of Daigo’s D1 car at Super Autobacs, surrounded by shiny things.
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Congratulations 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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Here’s the second batch of photos from last weekend’s Tochigi Baka Matsuri. Enjoy!
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Located about 100km north of Tokyo, Tochigi Prefecture is generally known for it’s beautiful mountainside, gyoza, temples and ski resorts, but is also one of the major hubs of drifting activity on the Kanto plain.
This year’s Tochigi Baka Matsuri (Tochigi Idiot Festival) run by two of the biggest idiots in the prefecture, D1 drivers Hiroshi Fukuda and “Mr Tochigi” Yoshinori Koguchi, was as it suggested, a festival of much idiotic activity, which generally meant a whole lot of drifting was going on.
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A “missile” car has a couple of definitions in Japan, depending in which context you’re talking. Usually it refers to a drift car that has been left close to standard externally, while still being heavily modified under the skin. Imagine the sort of thing a D1 driver would take up to the mountains for a bit of practice on weekends.
In the case of these cars however, it means that cost of tyres petrol, and entry fee for a track day combined should cost about as much as the car itself.
At this particular event at Nikko Circuit, four drivers showed up in missiles, and three of them were current D1 drivers, which meant the driving was sphincter-tigheningly close. The first two drivers here are Shinji Minowa in an R32 GTS-t, and this year’s D1GP Champion Daigo Saito in what is just barely recognisable as a JZX90 Mark II, running a very large turbo and 19-inch wheels and tyres left over from some of his slightly better looking JZX projects.
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