D1 NEXT Middle West 2026 Rd.1 YZ Results: Nomura Wins the Opener

Nomura (野村勇貴, #26) won D1 NEXT Middle West Series 2026 Round 1 at YZ Circuit East (Gifu) on Sunday 22 March 2026, beating Saito (齋藤佑亮, #42) in the final. Osada (長田健太郎, #20) was classified third and Nicolas Idogawa (井戸川ニコラス, #38) fourth, from 58 names on the first qualifying sheet. D1’s report gives Nomura 25 points, and because this was the season opener for the five-round Middle West series, the championship table starts with that number. This report was written up on 7 September 2026 from D1’s official post of 23 March 2026, and every figure in it was checked on the official pages on 7 Sep 2026.

Who won Round 1, and how?

D1 NEXT is the open-entry regional tier of the D1 ladder, below D1 Lights and D1 Grand Prix; our D1 NEXT explainer sets out how the six 2026 series fit together. Middle West is the Chubu one, run by C.O.S. Tokai, and it opened its season here on the hill circuit at YZ in Gifu.

The day ran in three stages. A first qualifying (予選, yosen) put 58 entries in order and sent 32 through. Those 32 ran the solo judged runs (単走, tanso) that seed the bracket — D1’s sheet publishes the finishing order for these but no scores, so we will not invent any. Tsuchiya (土屋理功, #47) topped them, Nomura was second, Kishiume (岸梅美幸, #35) third. The last 16 then went to tsuiso (追走), the tandem chase battles that decide the round.

Nomura won four of them: Yasuoka (安岡謙一) in the Top 16, Nagao (長尾健太郎) in the Top 8, Osada in the semi-final and Saito in the final. Saito, only 13th in the solo runs, had the harder ladder — Yoshimura (吉村旭人), Suzuki (鈴木孝則) and then Idogawa in the semi — and still reached the final. Tsuchiya’s day ended early for a top qualifier: he beat Mizoguchi (溝口智大) and then lost the Top 8 to Idogawa.

The bracket: which battles decided it?

The bracket is published as a graphic, so here is how we checked our reading of it. The seeding is the standard 16-car ladder off the solo-run order — 1 v 16, 8 v 9, 4 v 13 and so on — and every loser’s points in the official table match the stage and the seed exactly: 13, 12, 11 and 10 to the Top 8 losers seeded 1, 3, 5 and 7, then 8 down to 1 to the Top 16 losers in seed order. One caveat: the graphic prints 小島康寛 in two different Top 16 slots. The points table lists both 小島康寛 (11th, 6 points) and 小嶋告明 (13th, 4 points) — near-identical names — and the solo-run sheet seeds 小嶋告明 twelfth, so we read the seed-12 line as 小嶋告明. Treat that single line as TBC.

Round 1 points: where the Middle West table starts

Ninth to 16th: Yoshimura 8, ユン ジュンフム 7, Kojima (小島康寛) 6, NETO ARTHUR 5, Kojima (小嶋告明) 4, Kuroda 3, Yasuoka 2, Mizoguchi 1. Two of those names turn up again in July on the Niigata Series sheets: Yoshimura and Kishiume both appear in our Niigata Rd.1 report, which is what an open regional tier looks like when a driver is willing to tow.

Who else was on the sheet?

The 32 cars in the solo runs were 21 S-chassis Nissans (S13, PS13, RPS13, S14, S15 Silvias and 180SXs), seven JZX Toyotas, and four outliers: Nagao’s NA8C Roadster, an ECR33 Skyline, an AE86 Trueno and a ZN6 86. Nagao is on the local team that carries YZ Circuit’s own name, and he took the Roadster to eighth.

For an overseas reader the useful detail is the names. The entry list is printed partly in Latin script — Finnie Hayden (#37), Daniel Krstic (#34), NETO ARTHUR (#43) — and partly in katakana: Idogawa, ユン ジュンフム, 石川セザール (#19), 平岡ペドロ (#28). Nobody had to be a D1 licence holder to be there. D1’s own report also profiles the Kawase siblings (河瀬芽美 and 河瀬将貴), who run matching pink 180SXs; the younger brother, 18 and newly licensed, crashed in the morning practice, made the first cut 18th, and went out in the solo runs.

Where the season went next

Middle West Rd.2 came back to the same circuit on 24 May 2026, and C.O.S. Tokai posts its result on the same page as a separate image; we have not written that round up yet. Rd.3 on 20 September 2026 is the only Middle West round away from YZ, at Owara Circuit in Toyama.

Then it returns twice more, and these are the ones you can still plan for: Rd.4 at YZ Circuit East on Sunday 1 November 2026 and Rd.5 there on Sunday 13 December. Admission is ¥1,500, or ¥1,000 for YZ and Owara members, with junior-high age and under free — and at YZ that gate fee is charged to everyone on site, drivers included. What stalls people is not the money. There is no station: Nagoya is the base city and the last leg is a car, as our YZ Circuit East guide and our Tokai and Nagoya track roundup both spell out. The timetable comes from C.O.S. Tokai rather than from D1, and YZ’s own month grid does not always carry the D1 NEXT day. Entering rather than watching means the organiser’s Japanese-only paperwork.

Both YZ dates and the Owara round are on our drift event calendar, rechecked against the official pages every month; D1’s own series table says dates may change.