drifting

Most people already read or heard the news today: the D1GP drifter Atsushi Kuroi died three days ago in a motorcycle accident.

He was one of the early drifting pioneers and his professional drifting career began in the first season of D1GP (2001) when he entered it with his well known OneVia S13. He was well known for throwing up big clouds of smoke when going sideways and that is most probably what most people will remember of him.

I'd like to remember him like this:

As the man who could grip an amazing 77kg during the D1GP arm wrestling event!

I did know about the existence of turbo-ed 2T and 3T engines, but bi-turbo?

If you look well enough you can see a big intercooler behind the cutted front air dam. Also where the grille used to be an oil cooler has been placed. It is unknown which engine has been used for the swap, but it is surely a bi-turbo diesel engine.

The original car appears to be a TA60 Carina coupe and its 31 years old Finish owner takes really good care of it:

Yep, that's how easy it is to get a Carina sideways when you have loooooads of torque! I wonder how long it will take before D1GP will be flooded with diesel engines. :D :D

This is the most recent video of the car:

I wonder if there will be more updates soon! :)

A long long time ago drifting was not a popular sport and Keiichi Tsuchiya wasn't in every Video Option, Hot Version or Drift Tengoku episode you could find! Even covering the drift scene was quite rare! However in those early days Video Option was actually one of the few to cover that scene at all!

The following video from 1992 covers the street drifting, organized drifting and even a few of the "bloopers":

Amazing! Nobody would even think about using a Nissan Skyline GC110 for drifting nowadays! They are simply worth too much and they are almost as rare as a KPGC10 nowadays! Imagine what people will think in 15 years of us using Skyline R32s and Toyota AE86es for drifing! ;)

What Keiichi Tsuchiya did do was being a judge in drift competitions! This second part covers the Fukuoka National Racing competition:

Amazing! Keiichi Tsuchiya was, just like Daijiro Inada, young back then! :D

It is funny to see him freak out on a Nissan Silvia S13 locking up the rear wheels with the handbrake and drift through the corner at 20 km/h! Imagine that the current slowmotion replays of the D1GP have quicker cornering than that! :D

Of course I do understand that back then the skill mattered more than entry speed. Looking at the result of that match the AE86 did win fair and square!

TonyA. from FuzzyFeeling posted some old videos from some Silvias drifting on Mikuni pass way way back in 2003 by Youtube user kcrmsr. kcrmsr posted some other videos as well so naturally I browsed all of them till there was no video left to watch. ;)

This one was a quite funny one, where he is doing an Itsuki in one of the Silvias (starting at 1:09):

People who have seen Initial D will probably know exactly what I mean with doing an Itsuki, for others: in the episode "The Rainy Downhill!" from Stage One Kenta Nakamura (member of the Red Suns) challenges Takumi for a downhill race in the rain on Mt. Myogi. Takumi accepts and asks Itsuki (who hitched a ride from Takumi) to sit on the rear bench of the Trueno. In effect Itsuki adds extra weight on the rear wheels while tumbling from left to right (and vice versa) through the interior of the Trueno.

As you can see, IRL it is the same. The guy can't even sit straight while cornering the first three turns and on the last turn he almost ticks over...

I posted some old footage of touge drifting in 1996 before, but now 86ers.org found some more vintage videos from the early 90s. This was years before Shuichi Shigeno even moved his pencil enough to create Initial D!

The drifting looks very skilled for those days. Even though we are used to much higher speeds 17 years later it still looks quite fast drifting for an AE86 drifting uphill! The music kind of reminds me of the terrible music they used for all anime openings early 90s! Somehow I'm glad they did not use this type of music for Initial D. :D

The second video has a better taste in music:

In the second video they are drifting uphill again. That brings me to another thing: why are they drifting uphill? Isn't it much better to drift downhill?

Apart from drifting uphill: I see some very nice drifts and some other cars than the AE86: a B310, a TE71 and a KP61. Ah, can't we just go back to the 90s when the amount of horsepower didn't matter that much?