D1 Grand Prix 2026 Aichi Results: Yokoi Wins Rd.1, Fujino Rd.2

Masashi Yokoi (横井昌志, #70) won the opening round of the 2026 D1 Grand Prix at Aichi Sky Expo (Aichi) on Saturday 9 May 2026, and Hideyuki Fujino (藤野秀之, #66) won Round 2 on the Sunday. Koudai Sobagiri (蕎麦切広大, #31) lost both finals and still left the weekend on top of the championship with 42 points, from Naoki Nakamura (中村直樹, #99) on 34, while Nakamura won the solo runs on both days and put a 100.60 on the board on the Sunday. This is a backfilled report, written up on 7 September 2026 from D1’s official reports; every score and point below was checked on the official pages on 7 Sep 2026.

Who won Round 1, and how?

AICHI DRIFT was a first for the series: Aichi Sky Expo is the Aichi International Exhibition Center, next to Chubu Centrair airport in Tokoname, and the course was a temporary layout on a multipurpose lot in one corner of the site, so there is no permanent circuit here and no track-directory page for it. The official report describes a surface cleaner than D1’s Odaiba street course but crossed by covered drainage channels, flat to the eye and undulating in the car; the layout was wider than Odaiba too, enough for the quickest cars to pass 120 km/h. Four scoring zones were set, and the last of them, the left hairpin in the infield, punished overruns twice over, with a missed zone and a track-limits deduction on the same lap. One rule change framed the weekend: D1 has reduced the weighting its DOSS telemetry gives to speed, so that speed now counts the same as angle and initiation rather than more, closing a route to a high score without enough angle.

A D1 Grand Prix weekend is two championship rounds, one a day, each with its own solo runs, tansō (単走), and its own tandem tournament, tsuisō (追走); our D1 Grand Prix spectator guide explains the format. At Aichi the top 24 solo scores went through to the tandems, the top eight seeded straight into the Best 16 and ninth to 24th fighting a Best 24 round first.

Nakamura’s first solo run, 99.10, was the score of the day: angle and position set on the initiation and almost no correction through the zones. He went for a 100 on his second run, ran wide at the final left and kept the first score anyway. Kojiro Mekuwa (目桑宏次郎, #79) was second on 98.46 in his first event since moving to D-MAX, and Hokuto Matsuyama (松山北斗, #77) third on 97.82 after a soft transition into the hairpin. Shiina Tamaki (玉城詩菜, #14) went fourth on a deliberately contained run, Ryo Ishii (石井亮, #50) fifth, Sobagiri seventh and Hisato Yonai (米内寿斗, #47) eighth on his return after two years away. Ryu Nakamura (中村龍, #76) never started: his engine broke a block before the session.

The tandems went to the driver who had qualified 17th. Yokoi, in his first meeting after leaving D-MAX for his own privateer team, beat Nakamura in the Best 16 when Nakamura could not match him on the chase run, and said afterwards that winning that battle meant leading every following one. POP (Lattapon Keawchin, #89) knocked the reigning champion, Fujino, out in the Best 24, and the rookie Kazutaka Yanagi (栁和孝, #22) beat Daigo Saito (齋藤太吾, #87) and then Mekuwa to reach the Best 8 on debut. Tamaki beat Ishii, who half-spun his first run, for the first Best 4 of her career. The final lasted one run: Yokoi led, Sobagiri went in close from the entry, made contact, broke his left-front suspension and could not take the second run. It was Yokoi’s first win since the 2023 season opener.

D1 publishes its results in Japanese; the spellings above are the usual English ones, with the kanji beside each driver at first mention. Battles the official report does not name are left out rather than guessed.

Who won Round 2, and how did Nakamura score 100.60?

Sunday ran on the same layout in the same dry weather, and with a day of learning behind them the field made fewer mistakes and the scores rose. Junya Ishikawa (石川隼也, #33) led early with 98.81. Then Nakamura opened with 99.48, the best of the weekend to that point, and on his second run raised the throttle again, put the initiation exactly where he wanted it and took every zone without correction: 100.60, no deductions, the only score above 100 across the two days and his second solo win in two days. Mitsuru Murakami (村上満, #23) was second on 99.47 and Yumeto Hatanaka (畑中夢斗, #75) third on 99.02, with Sayaka Shimoda (下田紗弥加, #86) fifth and Yuta Fujiwara (藤原優汰, #15), a GT driver who had not reached the tandems in his first D1 season, seventh and seeded. Daiki Nishiyama (西山大貴, #67) made his first tandem bracket 16th, and Yoshitatsu Kaneda (金田義健, #5) made his first in eight years 20th, in the first GR Yaris the series has seen. Matsuyama, whose engine had been changed overnight, could not raise boost and went out in the solo runs.

Yokoi crashed in the morning check run hard enough to crush the boot lid, had the car repaired, qualified 14th and then beat Yonai and Hatanaka to reach the Best 8 — where a tyre bead came off his S14 on a chase run and ended his weekend. Under D1’s rules a bead separation withdraws the meeting’s points, so he was classified eighth with zero. Fujino took his revenge on POP in the Best 8 and reached a semi-final against Nakamura, whose chase run scored a full 15 proximity points; Nakamura had already touched a pole at the start of his lead run for a two-point deduction, Fujino’s lead run was clean at 99.4, and that was the margin. Sobagiri came through the other semi-final when Ishii hit him and stopped. In the final, Sobagiri chased for 14 proximity points and Fujino answered with 14.3, so once again the lead runs decided it, this time for Fujino. Sobagiri’s second runner-up finish in two days put him top of the championship, as D1’s own report says.

Who led the championship after Round 2?

By the time we checked, the official 2026 ranking page carried Rounds 1 to 4, so the table below is our sum of its Rd.1 and Rd.2 columns rather than a transcription of its total column. The scale is 25 points for a round win, 21 for second, 18 for third and 16 for fourth, down to 1 for sixteenth, plus 4, 3, 2 and 1 for the top four in the solo runs — which is how Nakamura’s third place and solo win on Sunday came to 22.

Yokoi and Fujino are level on 25 and the official page publishes no after-Round-2 snapshot to separate them, so we have not put one above the other. D1 keeps a separate solo-run ranking as well, which the same arithmetic has Nakamura leading on 56 from Mekuwa on 42, and a team ranking on which Sobagiri’s SHIBATA RACING TEAM sat top with 40, from Team TOYOTIRES DRIFT 1 on 29. How this scoring differs from Formula Drift Japan’s is in our D1GP vs Formula Drift Japan comparison.

Where can you watch the replay?

Saturday’s Round 1 stream, with the Yokoi–Sobagiri final, is a separate upload on the same channel, and each day also has a scoreboard-only stream; the commentary is in Japanese.

Where the season went next

The meeting drew 15,339 spectators over its three days. From Aichi the series went to Tsukuba Circuit (Ibaraki) for Rd.3 & 4 on 27–28 June, where Yokoi won both days and left with the championship lead; the detail is in our Tsukuba report.

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 practice with no spectator admission. Advance seats ran from ¥6,600 for a B seat to ¥11,000 for an SS seat, but every reserved category was marked 完売, sold out, when we checked on 4 September, and a wheelchair seat was ¥4,400 in advance. What is left is the same-day window: ¥8,800–¥14,300 per day, a separate ticket for each day, and ¥1,000 parking paid on the day. Our Ebisu Circuit guide covers the venue itself. After Ebisu the series goes to Autopolis (Oita) for Rd.7 & 8 on 24–25 October and to a finale on 14–15 November whose venue still read T.B.A. on the official page; all three sit on the event calendar.