D1 Grand Prix 2026 RD.ZERO Fuji Results: Matsuyama Wins Exhibition

Hokuto Matsuyama (松山北斗, #77) won the tandem tournament at D1 Grand Prix RD.ZERO, the exhibition match that opens the season, at Fuji International Speedway (Shizuoka) on Sunday 19 April 2026, beating Junya Ishikawa (石川隼也, #33) in the final for his second Round Zero win in a row. Koudai Sobagiri (蕎麦切広大, #31) won the solo runs on 99.40 in an Infiniti Q60 he had brought out for this round only, and D1 puts the crowd at 35,828. None of it scored: RD.ZERO carries no championship points, and the round is not one of the columns in D1’s 2026 ranking table. This is a backfilled report, written up on 7 September 2026 from D1’s official reports; every score and name below was checked on the official pages on 7 Sep 2026.

Who won Round Zero at Fuji?

Round Zero ran inside Motor Fan Festa 2026, a one-day car festival at Fuji Speedway in Oyama, Shizuoka, with free admission and a paid parking ticket. The drifting was on the main circuit, with the judged section running down to the Advan hairpin and out through the long 100R — not the Fuji Drift Park, the separate purpose-built drift course at the same venue that ordinary licence holders can book, which our Fuji Drift Park guide covers. D1 marked its 25th anniversary season here.

Nineteen drivers entered. Accidents and mechanical trouble thinned the field, and D1’s report says 15 cars took the solo runs, tansō (単走), of which the top eight went through to the tandem tournament, tsuisō (追走); our D1 Grand Prix spectator guide explains the two formats.

The official report describes a layout that punishes the transition into the Advan hairpin: a sharp, big-angle flick scores, but put it in the wrong place and the car either loses too much speed and gets unsettled or overruns, and several drivers dropped points exactly there. Sobagiri, sitting on a decent first run, put the second one in at the right spot with a violent flick and a big angle, and took the solo win by a clear margin. Kojiro Mekuwa (目桑宏次郎, #79), a solo-run winner in 2025, had just moved to D-MAX and, D1 says, was not yet at home in the car; he went out in the solo runs. Yoshichika Tamagawa (玉川艶哉, #12), stepping up to D1GP in a JZA80 Supra, was quick but made mistakes and finished ninth, one place short of the tandems.

Those eight made the bracket. D1 publishes its results in Japanese; the spellings above follow the readings printed beside each name in the official table.

What made RD.ZERO different from a points round?

Three things, and they matter before you read the scores as a season result.

It was an exhibition. D1’s own category title for the meeting is 2026 D1GP EXHIBITION MATCH RD.ZERO, and the 2026 ranking page runs columns for Rd.1 through Rd.10 only, so Matsuyama’s win and Sobagiri’s 99.40 are records of a good day rather than points in a table.

It was judged by people. The report states that DOSS, the telemetry system that measures speed, angle and line at a normal round, was not used, and that scoring was down to the human judges alone.

And no designated scoring zones were set — the marked sections where missing your line at a points round costs a fixed deduction. Sobagiri said afterwards that with nothing to protect he stopped worrying about running wide and drove the way he wanted, foot in.

The bracket: how Matsuyama got to the final

Eight cars, three rounds. The two returning drivers, Sasayama and Kaneda, both made the bracket and both went out in the first round. The report notes that this course rewards carrying grip speed through the gentle corners and then throwing the tail out early in the 100R, which makes understeer on initiation the easy mistake — and it decided several battles, Sobagiri’s included.

Ryu Nakamura also went out in the first round, with a vibration from the left rear and then a large mistake from understeer; the report does not name his opponent, so we have not guessed at it, and battles it does not describe are left out. Matsuyama’s own verdict: scrappy solo runs, then a deliberate policy of not making mistakes once the tandems began, helped by other people’s. He won here in 2025 as well and then had a mediocre season, so this time the job is to keep the momentum.

Where the season went next

The championship started three weeks later, at Aichi Sky Expo on 9–10 May, where Masashi Yokoi won Rd.1 and Hideyuki Fujino (藤野秀之, #66) won Rd.2, and Sobagiri left as points leader on 42 despite losing both finals; the detail is in our Aichi report. Yokoi then won both days at Tsukuba on 27–28 June, covered in our Tsukuba report. Nothing carried over from Fuji, because there was nothing to carry.

The next round you can still get to is Rd.5 & 6, EBISU DRIFT, at Ebisu Circuit (Fukushima) on Saturday 26 and Sunday 27 September 2026, on the Nishi course; the Friday is closed official practice with no spectator admission. Advance seats ran from ¥6,600 for a B seat to ¥11,000 for an SS seat, with a wheelchair seat at ¥4,400, but every reserved category was marked 完売, sold out, when we checked on 4 September. What is left is the same-day window: ¥8,800–¥14,300 per day, a separate ticket for each of the two days, and ¥1,000 parking sold only on the day. Our Ebisu Circuit guide covers the venue, and the round sits on the event calendar with the rest of the season.

Ebisu is a harder trip than Fuji. The reserved seats went before most people abroad knew they were on sale, the ticket pages are in Japanese only, and the last leg up the hill from Nihonmatsu is a bus four times a day or a taxi arranged the evening before, in Japanese.