D1 Lights 2026 Rd.7 & 8 Bihoku Results: Nakagawa and Seto Win

D1 Lights 2026 Rd.7 & 8 Bihoku Highland Circuit — read off d1gp.co.jp on 7 Sep 2026

Naotaka Nakagawa (中川尚隆, #11) won D1 Lights 2026 Round 7 at Bihoku Highland Circuit (Okayama) on Saturday 29 August 2026, beating Koji Yanagi (柳晃司, #16) in a final that needed a rerun, and Daisuke Seto (瀬戸大輔, #66) won Round 8 on the same circuit the next day, his first D1 Lights victory, beating Kenichi Nakamura (中村健一, #69) in another rerun. Championship leader Junichi Asano (浅野潤一, #19) scored 6 and 16 points for the weekend and leads on 133, 41 clear of Nakagawa on 92, with Seto on 91 and Yanagi on 88 and three rounds to run. This report was written up on 7 September 2026 from D1’s official reports, and every number in it was checked on the official pages on 7 Sep 2026: the ranking table already carries both rounds, while the Round 8 post is still a quick-results bulletin.

What is D1 Lights, and how does a two-round weekend work?

D1 Lights is the middle rung of the D1 ladder: below the professional D1 Grand Prix, above the regional, open-entry D1 NEXT series we cover in What is D1 NEXT?. A Lights weekend at one circuit is two complete rounds, Saturday and Sunday, each with its own points. The morning is tansō (単走), solo judged runs, two per driver with the better score counting, and the top 16 go into the afternoon tsuisō (追走), the tandem chase bracket that decides the round. At Bihoku both days ran from 8:00 gates to a 16:00 close with 44 names on the solo sheet. The circuit itself, the cheapest full drift day in our track directory, is in the Bihoku Highland guide.

Who won Round 7, and how?

Saturday’s course asked for three transitions along the straight, with clipping zones at the exit onto it, at mid-straight, at its end and deep into turn 1. Few managed three snappy flicks, says the official report; floating through on the handbrake cost points for wandering entries and small lines. Rain held off all day, the first fully dry round of the season.

Nakagawa took solo P1 on 97.95 from Naoki Ando (安藤直輝, #65) in the C33 Laurel and Tsuyoshi Igarashi (五十嵐剛, #51), both on 97.90; the cut fell at 95.90. Ando and Igarashi then went out in the Top 16 with machine trouble, and Asano, ninth in solo, lost his to Seto without the close drift the judges wanted. Nakagawa’s Top 8 against Seto was decided by course limits, both cars over them on run 1 and the smaller excursion winning. He beat Genki Mogami (最上弦毅, #36) in a semi-final Mogami ended off the course, while Yuichiro Toyoda (豊田雄一郎, #17) was barred from starting his for speeding in the paddock and handed Yanagi a walkover. The final was even after two runs; in the rerun Nakagawa led with angle and speed Yanagi could not close on, then held a fair distance while Yanagi missed part of zone 4 leading.

It was Nakagawa’s second win of 2026 after Round 5 at Ebisu Circuit (Fukushima) on 25 July, and it cut Asano’s lead from 52 points to 33 in a day. Mogami’s podium came after a car fire on the practice day and a broken diff in the morning check session; Yanagi said second was a first for him.

Ando, Igarashi and Asano were classified ninth, tenth and eleventh.

Who won Round 8, and how?

Sunday’s layout was closer to an ordinary Bihoku drift day: down the straight, through turns 1 and 2, round the outer loop and a hairpin-like corner into the infield, with a limit line at mid-straight that ruled out any big weave. That rewards one sharp initiation in the right place and early throttle; the report says plenty of drivers, still in Saturday’s rhythm, initiated too early and were marked down for direction as much as distance. A brief shower half-wet the surface, then it dried.

Seto had spent Saturday leaving the course at turn 1. His first run on Sunday stayed in and scored 98.75, the highest of the weekend; his second went off for a 34.00, which no longer mattered. Mogami was second on 98.20 and Nakagawa third on 97.55, ahead of Makoto Tanimoto (谷本真人, #58) and Eijo Noguchi (野口英譲, #48); the cut was 95.80.

The Top 16 opened with first against second in the championship, Asano fourteenth in solo against Nakagawa third: Nakagawa missed a zone leading, his drift nearly straightened at turn 1 chasing, and Asano went through. Both semi-finals ended in the five-minute repair window: Akihito Fujio (藤尾明仁, #9), chasing Seto, made contact at turn 2 and holed his intercooler, and Asano’s driveline failed against Kenichi Nakamura. In the final Nakamura chased well but, leading, left parts of two zones to force a rerun, and in the rerun Seto closed up while Nakamura’s zones were again incomplete. Seto’s second final became his first D1 Lights win, despite a turbo problem he said left the car close to stalling off the line; Nakamura, a past winner in D1 Street Legal, the category that preceded D1 Lights, was in a Lights final for the first time.

Nakagawa and Tanimoto, third and fourth in solo, were classified ninth and tenth.

Which battles do the official reports describe?

Those are the only pairings the reports name, so they are the only ones we list; the rest of each bracket is in the live archives below.

Who leads the championship after Round 8?

The official 2026 D1 Lights ranking on d1gp.co.jp already includes both Bihoku rounds, so this table is a straight transcription, 25 points for a win down to 1 for sixteenth. The before column is each total minus the two Bihoku scores; D1’s own preview gave Asano 111, Nakagawa 59 and Yanagi 57 going in.

With 75 points still on the table, everyone on 59 or more can still reach 133, which is the whole top eight; ninth-placed Dhnaram Casey (#37) on 50 cannot. Seto also leads the series’ separate solo-run ranking on 107, ahead of Yanagi on 98 and Nakagawa on 94.

Where can you watch the replay?

Saturday’s archive on the same official channel has Round 7, the three-flick solo runs and the Nakagawa–Yanagi rerun included.

Where the season went next: Tsukuruma in October, Mobara in December

Rounds 9 and 10 are at Tsukuruma Circuit Nasu (Tochigi) on Saturday 10 and Sunday 11 October 2026; the finale, Round 11, is a single day at Mobara Twin Circuit (Chiba) on Sunday 13 December. On 7 September the Tsukuruma round page carried the venue, address and organiser and nothing else, no ticket prices, no timetable; Bihoku’s had been posted 33 days out, ¥4,400 in advance and ¥6,000 at the gate through Lawson Ticket.

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; the only public transport into Takabayashi, the district it sits in, is Yu-Taku, the city’s reservation-only demand taxi, booked by phone in Japanese with your name, address and phone number. The 07:50 from the station reaches Takabayashi-jūmonji at 08:26 and the 16:57 return sits after a 16:00 close, but the walk from stop to gate is unpublished. The workaround, timetables included, is in our Tsukuruma Circuit Nasu guide.

Both dates, and every other D1 Lights, D1 Grand Prix and Formula Drift Japan round still to run in 2026, are on the event calendar, rechecked against the series pages each month.