D1 NEXT Hokkaido 2026 Rd.1 Chitose Results: Tanifuji Wins the Opener

Tanifuji (谷藤克哉, #13) won D1 NEXT Hokkaido Series Round 1 at Shin-Chitose Motorland (新千歳モーターランド, also written New Chitose Motorland) in Hokkaido on Sunday 14 June 2026, beating Naka (中翔大, #20) in the final. This was the opening round of the shortest series on the D1 NEXT calendar, so the championship table started here with 25 points to his name. Hirasawa (平澤蓮士, #18) topped the solo runs on 196 and took third in a run-off against Hiraide (平出勇太, #12), who had qualified 23rd of the 24 drivers in the bracket. This report was written up on 7 September 2026 from D1’s official post of 16 June 2026, and every figure in it was checked on the official pages on 7 Sep 2026.

D1 publishes D1 NEXT results in Japanese only, with no romanised entry list, so the readings here are ours and unconfirmed by the organiser; 下沖, 中右 and 中 in particular can be read more than one way, which is why the kanji sits beside every name.

Who won Round 1, and how?

D1 NEXT is the open-entry regional tier of the D1 ladder, single-day events run by local organisers; our D1 NEXT explainer covers the format, the fees and the one-day licence. Hokkaido is the shortest of the six 2026 series — two Sundays, run by the Hokkaido Drift Challenge committee (北海道ドリフトチャレンジ実行委員会), with Asano and Nozawa (浅野潤一・能澤悠多) judging. This was the opener, on the tarmac at Shin-Chitose Motorland just south of Sapporo.

Solo runs came first: tansō (単走), two scored runs per driver, ranked on the better with the second as tie-break. That tie-break mattered twice. Hirasawa and Mizuguchi (水口優雅) both ran 196, and Hirasawa’s 194.5 second run against Mizuguchi’s 194 gave him P1 and the tansō title; Tanifuji and Yamaguchi (山口銀平) both ran 194.8, split the same way. Thirty-one drivers appear on the sheet, two with no score at all; the top 24 went through and the cut fell at 189.

Then the tsuisō (追走), the tandem chase battles that decide the round. With 24 cars rather than 16, the top eight sat out a first round while seeds 9 to 24 paired off, and the survivors met them in the round of 16. Tanifuji’s route from fifth was Kanbayashi (上林雅英), Koyanagi (小柳翔平), Hirasawa in the semi-final and Naka in the final: four wins.

The byes did not help the drivers who got them. Six of the eight seeded straight through lost their opening battle — Mizuguchi, Shimooki, Konno, Yamaguchi, Sawaya and Konishi — leaving only Hirasawa and Tanifuji from the top eight in the last eight. Hiraide’s day is the other one worth knowing: 23rd of 24 in the solo runs, he beat tenth-placed Shimatani (島谷龍太), then seventh-placed Sawaya, then 18th-placed Nakagawa (中川実) to reach the semi-finals, and only lost the third-place run-off.

The bracket: who beat whom from the round of 16?

In the first round, before the seeds joined: Ishikura beat Funahashi (舟橋弘靖), Ito beat Kido (木戸光希), Koyanagi beat Sawaya (澤谷理貴, no relation on the sheet to Sawaya Taku), Kanbayashi beat Yamamoto (山本健太), Nakagawa beat Takahashi (髙橋純希), Hiraide beat Shimatani, Naka beat Sanada (真田雄司) and Nakau beat Nakano (中野悠河). The graphic records who won each pairing, not the judges’ calls, so that is all we can tell you.

One caveat on the source: the bracket graphic is headed 2025.06.14 選考会, a year out of date. D1’s post dates the round 14 June 2026, a Sunday, and 14 June 2025 was a Saturday, so we read the header as a template that was not rolled over.

What Round 1 was worth

D1’s Round 1 post carries no points table — only the solo-run scores and the bracket. The points below come from the official 2026 D1 NEXT ranking, which lists Hokkaido as its own table:

Those are the rows we could confirm against the official ranking, and we have left the rest out rather than guess. The usual D1 NEXT scale runs 25, 21, 18 and 16 for the top four, then 13 down to 10 for the Top 8 losers and 8 down to 1 for the round-of-16 losers in qualifying order — but it would put Yamaguchi on 5 rather than the 4 the official table shows, so the lower half of this round does not fall out of it cleanly. Treat any figure not in the table above as TBC.

Where the season went next

Round 2 came three weeks later on the summer car park at Kamui Ski Links, where Yamaguchi won and Naka took the series without winning a round; that day has its own Round 2 report, and with only two dates on the schedule it closed the Hokkaido season. Northern Japan’s drift calendar works like that — a short, dense summer, then the tracks that stay open change character entirely, as our winter drifting guide sets out.

So if you want to see a D1 NEXT round in 2026, the realistic target is Central Rd.3 at Mobara Twin Circuit (Chiba) on Sunday 13 September 2026, which runs the same 24-car chase tournament Chitose used: ¥19,800 to enter, plus ¥2,200 on the day for the provisional-licence briefing if you hold no D1 licence, entries closing 10 September, and ¥1,000 at the gate plus ¥1,000 parking per car to watch. It is the easiest D1 NEXT round in the country to reach without a car; our Mobara guide has the JR line from Tokyo Station and the bus from Mobara Station.

The entry is the wall, not the money. Mobara’s process runs in Japanese from end to end: a web form, an entry sheet returned by fax or email, a bank transfer inside three days, and no cancellation once the form is in.

Every remaining 2026 D1 NEXT date sits on our drift event calendar, rechecked against the official series table each month; D1 marks its own dates as provisional.