D1GP
 |
|
| Category | Drifting |
|---|---|
| Country |
 Japan
|
| Inaugural season | 2000 |
| Drivers' champion |
Daigo Saito (2016) |
| Official website |
D1GP.co.jp (in Japanese) D1GP.com (in English) |
 Current season
|
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The D1 Grand Prix (D1グランプリ D1 guranpuri), abbreviated as D1GP and subtitled Professional Drift, is a production car drifting series from Japan. After several years of hosting amateur drifting contests, Daijiro Inada, founder of Option magazine and Tokyo Auto Salon, and drifting legend, Keiichi Tsuchiya, hosted a professional level drifting contest in 1999 and 2000 to feed on the ever increasing skills of drifting drivers who were dominating drifting contests in various parts of Japan. In October 2000, they reformed the contest as a five-round series. In the following year for the following round, the introduction of the two car tsuiou battle, run in a single-elimination tournament format, a common tradition for tōge races which became popular with car enthusiasts.
Since then, the series has spread from the United States to United Kingdom and Malaysia to New Zealand with an ever increasing fanbase all over the world. The series has become a benchmark for all drifting series as its tsuisou format became widely adopted in drifting events throughout the world and is the most highly regarded of all series. The series helped to turn not just its personnel but also many of its drivers into celebrities with appearances in TV shows and car magazines all over the world along with scale models and video game appearances for their cars. It was credited for the increase several-fold in tuning businesses specialising in drift set-ups.
The art of drifting can be traced to the early days of motorsport when pre-war Grand Prix and dirt track racing drivers such as Tazio Nuvolari used an at-the-limit form of driving called the four-wheel drift.
The bias ply racing tires of the 1960s-1980s lent themselves to driving styles with a high slip angle. As professional racers in Japan drove this way, so did the street racers.
As street tōge racing became increasingly common, one of the first drifting contests was hosted by the Japanese Carboy magazine in 1986 and then in 1989, the year after the first introduction of the Video Option series Daijiro Inada (稲田大二郎) decided on introducing a rival drifting event which was judged by Keiichi Tsuchiya known as the Ikaten. Through the years, the standards of drifting drivers has risen rapidly and drivers began to dominate the series. As a result, Inada decided on a new series to accommodate the more experienced and skilled drivers. In 2000, a new series called All Japan Professional Drift Championship (全日本プロドリフト選手権, Zen Nihon Puro Dorifuto Sensyuken) consisting of Keiichi Tsuchiya (土屋圭市) and Manabu Orido (織戸 学) as judges, and Manabu Suzuki (鈴木 学) as commentator. Other personnel consisted of Kitahara, as the tech inspector, and Takayasu Ozaku (more commonly known as Zaku the perverted camerman) as the series' long serving cameraman. Racing driver Tarzan Yamada made appearances in earlier rounds and Inada himself would usually make guest appearances in the opening ceremony and judging stand.
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Wikipedia