Central Circuit: How to Drift in Hyogo (2026)

If you have searched for a drift track in Kansai, two names come back. One is Meihan. The other is Central Circuit — a proper 2.8 km permanent road course in the hills of Taka, Hyogo, 25 minutes off the Chugoku Expressway and an easy drive from Osaka or Kobe. Almost nothing in English explains how a visitor actually gets on track there, and the assumption most people arrive with is wrong.

Here is what the official pages say, verified 30 July 2026.

What you are actually looking at

Central Circuit opened in September 1996 and is a JAF-certified circuit — JAF is Japan’s national motorsport authority, and it lists Central as a nationally certified permanent racing course. The course is 2,804 m, right-handed, 11–15 m wide, with 20 m of elevation change, a 677 m main straight and a flyover that passes under it. COME, one of the shops that runs events there, counts twelve corners: three left, nine right. Gates open at 7:30, running stops at 17:00, and the place is closed on Mondays — with the Tuesday taken instead when a Monday falls on a public holiday.

Admission is ¥1,000 per person for the whole day, free for junior-high age and under, and the official page notes it can change for events. That ¥1,000 is the cheapest way to stand at a Japanese drift day, and nobody stops you spending it.

Drifting happens in the car park, not on the road course

This is the part that surprises people. The regular drift day at Central is LiiMake DD’s Satomin Drift day (soukoukai — a run day a shop or club organises, rents the venue for and sells entries to). Its own pages are blunt about the venue: it is held on the car park behind the main stand, with pylons laid out to make courses. Not the 2.8 km circuit.

That sounds like a downgrade until you read the format. A day works through four layouts — donuts and figure-of-eight, a tightrope course, a mini course of six to eight pylons, then a full course of around twelve that changes every round — with two ten-minute donut slots reserved for people who cannot do a figure-of-eight yet. Roughly 25 cars, running 08:00 to 16:30 after a 07:50 briefing, group photo at 16:50, everyone out by 16:55. It has run 61 times since July 2016.

The car list they publish is the honest Kansai grassroots mix: FD3S and FC3S RX-7s, AE86, JZX100 Mark II and Chaser, S13, S14, S15, 180SX, R32 through R34, BRZ, Laurel, Supra, a Lancer Evo wagon, a pickup and a kei truck. Any drivetrain, automatic or manual. For the same scene on a different Kansai layout, our Meihan Sportsland guide covers the C course and its wall.

The circuit’s own running is a licence and a lapping slot

Buy running from the circuit itself and you get something different. The monthly time schedule splits the day into thirteen 30-minute slots from 8:30 to 16:50, labelled by vehicle class: four-wheel with plates, four-wheel without plates, bikes under and over 400 cc, formula, karts. It is a lapping timetable, and drift is not one of the categories on it. Days that an organiser has hired are marked as exclusive use instead — in August 2026 that is the 10th, 13th, 14th, 27th and part of the 30th.

To use those slots you need the circuit’s own four-wheel licence:

The licence course is about two hours — classroom, then a led practical run — after which you can enter member slots the same day. And from year two the annual fee renews by Japanese bank direct debit, so the paperwork asks for your account details and your registered bank seal.

What it costs, two ways

The circuit has also hosted its own drift coaching day, GOODRIDE presents Central Drift School, at ¥10,000 with graded classes from never-drifted upwards. Its published rounds are 2023 and 2024 and no 2026 dates were listed as of 30 July 2026, so treat it as TBC. The entry method is worth knowing anyway, because it is the ceiling of difficulty here: download a form, fill it in, stamp it with a personal seal, post or fax it to an address in Kobe, then pay by transfer to a Japanese bank account.

The one step you cannot do from abroad

Here it is, plainly. Entry to the Satomin Drift day exists only inside a Japanese-language LINE conversation. You add their official LINE account, send your name, your car and what you want to practise in Japanese, wait for them to send you an entry form, fill that in, wait for them to send bank details, and pay by transfer to a Japanese account by their deadline — and if you go quiet for two days after the form, the entry is void. There is no English page, no card checkout and no international payment path. The circuit’s own site is Japanese-only too; the one English sentence we found anywhere in this chain is a line in DOGFIGHTPRO’s Instagram profile inviting track-day enquiries.

Getting there without a car

The official access page names two rail options and shrugs: Nishiwaki-shi Station on the JR Kakogawa Line, which has a bus, and Tanikawa on the JR Fukuchiyama Line, which does not. It then names two nearby stops, Sakamoto-higashi and Kojiya, and links a bus timetable from 2022. Here is the current one, from Taka town’s own schedule revised 1 June 2026:

Read that return column again, because it decides your trip. On a weekday event the 18:35 gets you out comfortably. On a Sunday — the day drift runs — the last bus leaves Sakamoto-higashi at 16:33, and the day does not clear until 16:55. Public transport gets you in to a Sunday drift day; it does not get you home. Budget a taxi, or share a car.

By road it is simple: 25 minutes from Takinosha IC or Kasai IC on the Chugoku Expressway, with COME putting it at roughly 50 minutes from Ikeda IC and an hour from Suita IC on the Osaka side. One request from the organiser we will pass on: keep off the throttle on the approach roads. Revving is allowed in the drift area between 08:00 and 16:30 and nowhere else. This is farmland with houses on it, and the day exists because the neighbours tolerate it.

Is it worth building a trip around?

If you want maximum seat time with minimum Japanese, Ebisu is still the easier answer, and our guide to entering a Japanese drift track day lays out the general path. But Central is the Kansai venue where a first-timer gets supervised donut practice for ¥11,000 all-in, on a surface where mistakes cost tyres rather than bodywork, alongside people running the exact cars you are thinking of buying. Check the dates on our event and track calendar and compare venues in the track directory before you fix your route through Kansai.