D1 Lights 2026 Rd.1 & 2 Nikko Results: Shimabukuro and Asano Win

Ryoma Shimabukuro (島袋竜馬, #52) won D1 Lights 2026 Round 1 at Nikko Circuit (Tochigi) on Saturday 4 April 2026 on his first start in the series, beating Mitsunori Ito (伊藤満紀, #90) in a final run on a fully wet track. Junichi Asano (浅野潤一, #19) won Round 2 on the same circuit the next day in the dry, taking the solo runs and the tandem bracket and beating Ito in the final again. Ito’s two second places against Asano’s 18 and 25 points left Asano leading the championship on 43 with Ito one point behind, exactly as D1’s own report put it that evening. This is a backfilled report, written up on 7 September 2026 from D1’s official reports; every score, pairing and point below was checked on the official pages on 7 Sep 2026.

What is D1 Lights, and how does a Nikko double-header work?

D1 Lights is the middle rung of the D1 ladder, below the professional D1 Grand Prix and above the regional, open-entry series explained in What is D1 NEXT?. One weekend at one circuit is two rounds with separate points: the morning is tansō (単走), solo judged runs, two each with the better score counting and the top 16 going through, and the afternoon is tsuisō (追走), the tandem chase bracket that decides the round.

Nikko has opened the Lights season three years running, and the two days share a circuit but not a course. Saturday ran from the second half of the back straight to the exit of turn 4, with four transit zones inherited from the 2025 opener, one of them shrunk. Sunday started earlier on that straight, forcing a real flick into turn 10 at its end, added a zone by that flick point and moved the turn 1 entry deeper. D1 counted 1,008 spectators across the three days; what the circuit is like on an ordinary day is in our Nikko Circuit guide.

Who won Round 1, and how?

The solo runs were dry, and the new zone positions changed how the final corner had to be driven: plenty lost points to course limits, missed zones and handbrake corrections, and a scrappy final corner spoiled turn 1 as well. Mitsuki Ito (伊藤充輝, #32) won them on 97.80 from Daisuke Nakamura (中村大介, #79) on 97.60 and Ren Azami (浅見廉, #88) on 97.55; the cut for the bracket fell at 96.50. Ito told D1 he only ever drives Nikko and normally helps mark those zone lines as staff, and that an opening-round solo win was what he had been aiming at all along.

Then it rained. The bracket ran fully wet, and five of the eight Top 16 battles were settled by a spin. Shimabukuro — entered for the 2025 finale but unable to start it because his car was not finished — was making his first D1 Lights appearance. He beat Nakamura in the Top 16, then Asano in a semi-final that went to a rerun where his chase carried the angle Asano’s did not. Asano had already put out Genki Mogami (最上弦毅, #36), the 2025 series winner, in the Top 8: Mogami hit him from behind at the final-corner exit while chasing, then spun while leading. In the final Shimabukuro stayed with a lead run that took Ito slightly off the course, and Ito’s own attack ended in contact at the last corner. Fifteenth in the solo runs, first at the end of the day.

Who won Round 2, and how?

Sunday was dry throughout and the scores fell, which the report puts down to arithmetic rather than driving: with two main judged corners instead of one, a 98-level run at each still comes out at 96 in a system that deducts from 100. Asano scored 96.25 to win the solo runs from Kazuyuki Akuzawa (阿久澤一幸, #99) on 95.75 and Tomoya Konoki (此木智也, #75) on 95.65. It was his first solo win in six seasons of trying, and he said it pleased him more than a tandem win would.

The bracket then ran close to form. The only Top 16 result against the solo order was Mogami over Krupenkin Aleksandr (#28), on the latter’s first appearance in a Lights bracket, and Saturday’s winner went out to Mitsuki Ito after a mistake at the final corner chasing and a zone deduction leading. Asano beat Mogami again in the Top 8, then Nakamura in a semi-final Nakamura had led on the opening run before a course-limit deduction on the second. The other semi-final went to Ito when Konoki, who had matched him flick for flick on both straights, ran wide past the judges’ stand while leading; Konoki said he was short of fuel and took the escape road rather than risk hitting anything. In the final Asano was marked down for leaving a zone early while leading, but Ito then missed the zone in front of the judges completely on his own lead run and Asano’s tidy chase turned it round. Ito was runner-up on both days.

Which battles do the official reports describe?

Those are the pairings the two reports name, so they are the only ones we list.

Who led the championship after Round 2?

The official ranking page now carries all eight rounds run so far, so the table below is our sum of its RD.1 and RD.2 columns rather than a transcription of its total. It matches what D1 wrote on the Sunday: Asano first, Ito a point behind.

A round win pays 25 points, so two rounds in, nothing was settled: eight drivers sat inside 25 points of the lead. The separate solo-run ranking, summed the same way, had Mitsuki Ito first on 32 from Nakamura on 30 and Mitsunori Ito on 24, with Asano fourth on 23 despite winning Sunday’s.

Where can you watch the replay?

We could not find a Saturday stream for Round 1 on the same official channel, so the wet bracket exists only in the written report.

Where the season went next

D1 Lights went to Meihan Sportsland (Nara) on 6–7 June for Rounds 3 and 4, where Dhnaram Casey (#37) won both days and posted the series’ first 100.00 solo score — the Meihan report has it. Rounds 5 and 6 followed at Ebisu Circuit (Fukushima) on 25–26 July, wet on both days, with a win each for Naotaka Nakagawa (#11) and Asano in the Ebisu report. Rounds 7 and 8 at Bihoku Highland Circuit (Okayama) on 29–30 August went to Nakagawa and Daisuke Seto (#66) and pushed Asano’s lead out to 41 points; that is the Bihoku report.

Two meetings are still to come. Rounds 9 and 10 run at Tsukuruma Circuit Nasu (Tochigi) on Saturday 10 and Sunday 11 October 2026, one round per day, and the Round 11 finale is a single day at Mobara Twin Circuit (Chiba) on Sunday 13 December. On 7 September 2026 neither round page published a spectator price or a running order, so there is nothing to buy yet, only a date to hold.

Tsukuruma is the easy trip that turns hard at the end. Nasu-shiobara is a Tohoku Shinkansen stop, but no scheduled bus reaches the circuit: Takabayashi, the district it sits in, appears nowhere in the city’s fixed-route bus data. The only public way in is Yu-Taku, Nasushiobara’s reservation-only demand taxi, ¥200 a ride, booked by phone in Japanese with a name, address and phone number, and morning rides have to be booked the day before. The 07:50 from the station’s West Exit reaches Takabayashi-jūmonji at 08:26 and the 16:57 comes back; the walk from that stop to the gate has never been published. Timetables and workarounds are in our Tsukuruma Circuit Nasu guide.

Both remaining dates, and every other D1 Lights, D1 Grand Prix and Formula Drift Japan round left in 2026, sit on the event calendar, which is rechecked against the series pages every month.