D1 Lights 2026 Rd.3 & 4 Meihan Results: Casey Wins Both

Dhnaram Casey (#37) won both D1 Lights rounds at Meihan Sportsland (Nara) over the weekend of 6–7 June 2026, beating Junichi Asano (浅野潤一, #19) in Saturday’s final and Akihito Fujio (藤尾明仁, #9) in Sunday’s. On the dry Saturday his second solo run scored 100.00, which D1’s report calls the first 100-point run in D1 Lights history. Asano still led the championship after Round 4, 24 points clear of Mitsunori Ito (伊藤満紀, #90), with Casey’s two maximum scores lifting him straight to third. 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 Meihan 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, seeded first against sixteenth.

Meihan alters the layout between its two days. Saturday used turn 2 as a hairpin into the infield, the configuration most Meihan events run; Sunday stayed on the outer loop to turn 3 first, which moved the fourth of the four clipping zones. Drivers were also told that exiting the final corner at a shallow angle — the habit that buys straight-line speed — would now be heavily penalised. D1 counted 1,069 spectators over the three days; how the circuit works on an ordinary day is in our Meihan Sportsland guide.

Who won Round 3, and how?

Casey had a wobble on his first run and still scored 99.55. His second had everything the judges list — initiation point, sharpness, angle, throttle, stability, line — and returned 100.00. Tsuyoshi Igarashi’s (五十嵐剛, #51) 99.00 and Naoki Ando’s (安藤直輝, #65) 98.50 were the closest anyone came. It was Casey’s second solo win in a row at this circuit, after a 99.4 at the 2025 Meihan round. The cut for the tandem bracket fell at 96.95, and it caught two of the championship’s top four: Ryoma Shimabukuro (島袋竜馬, #52) and Daisuke Nakamura (中村大介, #79).

Casey then came through Rohab Khan (#7) and Kenichi Nakamura (中村健一, #69) in the bracket; Asano beat Fujio, Genki Mogami (最上弦毅, #36) and Naotaka Nakagawa (中川尚隆, #11) to reach a second final in a row. Before the tandems, D1 warned that leading deliberately shallow — running in “escape mode” — would be marked down hard. In the final Asano chased close but ran wide at turn 2; by his own account a misfire on the back section cost him, after a car problem before the final had him considering retirement. Casey’s chase run was the sharper of the two, and the round was his first D1 Lights win.

Who won Round 4, and how?

Sunday rained from the morning. The judges relaxed the zones — close enough no longer cost points — and allowed one wheel over the limit line in front of the stand. What they still wanted was a sharp initiation and angle, and the report is blunt that the cautious style most drivers adopted, lifting on the straight and pulling the handbrake early, scored badly.

Koji Yanagi (柳晃司, #16) did the opposite, initiating late and deep, and his 98.40 was his first solo win in the series; Okumo (奥茂祐真, #40) was second on 97.85 and Daisuke Seto (瀬戸大輔, #66) third. Casey spun his first run — “embarrassing”, he called it — then went safe on the second and qualified sixth. Half the tandem field had changed overnight: Kenichi Nakamura and Nakagawa, third and fourth on Saturday, both missed the cut, while Yanagi and Sho Saito (齋藤翔, #15) reached their first semi-finals. The final was two Meihan regulars who, by Casey’s account, practise together once or twice a month. Fujio led first and Casey stayed with him from the initiation; chasing, Fujio matched the entry, then went shallow and straightened.

Which battles decided the two brackets?

Pairings come from D1’s official Rd.3 and Rd.4 tandem brackets; the reasons are only those the reports actually give.

Who led the championship after Round 4?

The official ranking page now carries all eight rounds run so far, so this is our sum of its RD.1 to RD.4 columns rather than a transcription of its total. It matches what D1 wrote at the time: Asano 24 clear, Casey up to third.

Casey is the outlier: two maximum scores from a driver with no points at all from the first two rounds, third on 50 with two results to everyone else’s four. Shimabukuro, who won Round 1, missed the tandem cut on both Meihan days and has not scored since Round 2.

Where can you watch the replay?

Sunday’s archive on the same official channel has Round 4, the wet solo runs and the all-Meihan final.

Where the season went next

D1 Lights went to Ebisu Circuit (Fukushima) on 25–26 July for Rounds 5 and 6, wet on both days, where Nakagawa and Asano took a win each — the Ebisu report has the detail. Rounds 7 and 8 followed at Bihoku Highland Circuit (Okayama) on 29–30 August, with wins for Nakagawa and Seto and 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.

The Tsukuruma trip is easy until the last few kilometres. Nasu-shiobara is a Tohoku Shinkansen stop, but no scheduled bus serves 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, which has to be booked by phone in Japanese with a name, address and phone number, and morning rides must be booked the day before. The 07:50 from the station’s West Exit reaches Takabayashi-jūmonji at 08:26 and the 16:57 goes back; the walk from that stop to the gate has never been published. Timetables and the 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.