D1 NEXT Fuji 2026 Rd.1 Results: Kota Tsuboi Wins the Opener

Kota Tsuboi (坪井 己汰, #27) won D1 NEXT Series Fuji Rd.1 at Fuji Speedway Drift Park (Shizuoka) on Sunday 6 September 2026, beating Tomohiro Shibuya (渋谷 知弘, #17) in the final. Ken Sato (佐藤 謙, #3) took third, and #37 MINAMI was the other semi-finalist. Sato had topped the qualifying session that set the bracket on 98.4, with Tsuboi second on 98.3 — though it was Tsuboi who had already put the highest single run of the day, 99.05, on the board in the earlier session. No cumulative points table for the Fuji series has been published by anyone, checked on the official pages on 8 September 2026; the series is two rounds long and Rd.2 on 21 November settles it.

Who won Round 1, and how?

Forty-three cars entered, against a 65-car cap, and entries had closed on 3 September. The day ran two qualifying sessions — tansō (単走), judged runs taken on your own — with two scored runs each out of 100. The Top-16 bracket was seeded from the second session, and its order matches that sheet position by position.

Sato led it on 98.4, but his second run collapsed to 62.5. Tsuboi was the steadier card by a distance: 98.3 and 98.2, the only driver in the top eight with both runs above 98. Kensuke Hirata (平田健介, #2) seeded third on 97.65, Yuta Kobayashi (小林 優太, #15) fourth. Tsuboi’s 99.05 in the first session stayed the highest score anyone put down all day across both sessions, and he converted the second seed into the win: past Yusei Iijima (飯島 優惺, #30), then Kobayashi, then MINAMI, then Shibuya in the final. Shibuya came the other way, from the seventh seed after a scrappy 67.5 opening run and a 97.5 recovery. Where this tier sits under D1 Lights and D1 Grand Prix is in our D1 NEXT Series explainer, and the venue itself is in our Fuji Speedway Drift Park guide.

Where do the official results actually live?

This is worth knowing before you go looking. Wins Again, the organiser, publishes no results page for D1 NEXT Fuji. What the official event site published instead, on the day of the event, is a notice titled 順位表の確認方法 — how to check the standings — and that notice points at a shared Google Drive folder called D1-NEXT FUJI 2026.09.06. The results exist only inside it, as Google Sheets: the entry list, both qualifying sheets, the group split, the final tournament bracket, a timetable PDF and a course map. There is no press release and no summary. Every placing and score in this report was exported from those sheets on 8 September 2026.

What was on the grid?

D1 NEXT entry lists are usually a wall of Silvias, and this one is Silvia and 180SX heavy too. But the runner-up drove a JZX100 Mark II, and the 43-car sheet also carries a JZX90 Cresta in the hands of eighth seed Yuki Komizu (小水 佑記, #35), two Chasers, three Fuga saloons — Go Kamiya (神谷 剛, #1) took his into the quarter-finals — a BRZ driven by sixth seed Yuzuka Tsukamoto (塚本 柚香, #8), two Altezzas including tenth seed Joyce Andrew, three Skylines, two AE86 Levins and a modern ZN6 86, a Soarer and an ND Roadster. That is a broader chassis spread than a D1 Grand Prix grid gives you, and it is one of the reasons a NEXT round is a good day to watch.

The bracket: who beat whom?

Two of the eight opening battles went to the lower seed, and the top qualifier went out in the semi-finals. One warning about that table: the official bracket sheet records who advanced and nothing else. There are no battle scores on it, no one-more-time markers and no notes about contact or incidents, so we are not going to tell you how any of these were won. The names are Hepburn readings from the furigana column of the official entry list, because D1 NEXT publishes no English driver list; #37 MINAMI is written that way on the official sheets.

Where does Round 1 leave the Fuji series?

The bracket sheet labels only 優勝, 準優勝 and 第3位 — winner, runner-up and third — so MINAMI is the other semi-finalist rather than a classified fourth, and the four quarter-finalists are unranked between themselves.

There is no championship table to print. As of 8 September 2026 neither Wins Again nor D1’s own site publishes cumulative points for the Fuji series, and the Drive folder holds no points sheet either. That is not an oversight so much as a scale question: Fuji is a two-round series, Rd.1 on 6 September and Rd.2 on 21 November, and both run on the same Drift Park. Other D1 NEXT regions run longer calendars and get closer to a season — the Central series, for instance, is five rounds, and its Rd.2 at Mobara went to the eighth qualifier.

When is the next Fuji round, and what stops you entering it?

D1 NEXT Series Fuji Rd.2 is on Saturday 21 November 2026, same venue, same organiser, and it is the other half of the series. Entry is ¥19,800 plus ¥2,200 handed over on the morning for the provisional-licence briefing and its issue if you hold no D1 licence. Watching the Drift Park costs nothing, but Fuji Speedway’s own gate admission is charged separately: the standing adult rate is ¥1,200, and 6 September was raised to ¥3,000 on the day, ¥2,500 in advance, because a race was running on the main circuit that weekend. Both Fuji dates are on our drift event calendar, and the general shape of signing up for a Japanese competition day is in our entry guide for foreign drivers.

Every step of that chain is in Japanese and none of it is joined up. The entry form is Japanese. The provisional-licence briefing is delivered in Japanese on the morning, in cash. The results come out inside a Google Drive folder rather than on a page you can bookmark. And the gate fee is not the organiser’s to quote — it belongs to Fuji Speedway and it moves weekend to weekend depending on what else is on the main circuit, which is exactly the number an overseas visitor budgets wrong.