FDJ2 2026 Rd.3 Ebisu West Results: Riki Nakamura Wins, Leads by 53

Riki Nakamura (中村龍輝, #1) won FDJ2 2026 Round 3 at Ebisu Circuit (Fukushima), on the West Course, on Sunday 21 June 2026, beating Manato Mogi (茂木真那斗, #270) in the final; Tatsuya Kobayashi (小林竜也, #62), who had topped qualifying with 87, was classified third and Toshihiko Mizuno (水野俊彦, #104) fourth. It was Nakamura’s second win in a row in Formula Drift Japan’s development series, and on our sum of the official per-round points he left Fukushima leading JAYCE (ジェイス, #23) by 53, 293 to 240, having arrived 3 ahead. This report was written up on 7 September 2026 from the official result sheet, which is still headed 暫定リザルト, provisional, and every number in it was checked on the official pages on 7 Sep 2026.

Who won Round 3, and how?

FDJ2 is the middle rung of the Formula Drift Japan ladder, the development series one step below the top class; the three tiers are explained in our Formula Drift Japan guide. It came to the West Course, the show course at Ebisu that also hosts D1GP, a week after the top class had run its own Round 3 on the same layout. Admission was ¥3,500 a day at the gate, parking ¥1,000, with no advance sale, and the official timetable put qualifying at 13:00 on the Saturday, the Top 32 at 09:40 on the Sunday and the Top 16 to the final from 13:10. The circuit, its courses and the rental cars are in our Ebisu Circuit guide.

Saturday 20 June was tansō (単走), solo judged runs, two per driver, ranked on the better score. Kobayashi’s 87, backed by a 76, was P1 by five from JAYCE on 82, with Mogi and Kaito Aoki (青木改斗, #444) on 80 and Nakamura fifth on 79. Only 24 of the 40 drivers on the qualifying sheet posted a score, so the Top 32 bracket was drawn with eight bye runs, and the last scored place, Shuhei Itoyama’s (糸山宗兵, #82) 48, was enough to get in. The sheet gives no reason for the sixteen zeros and we will not guess at one.

Sunday 21 June was tsuisō (追走), the tandem chase battles that decide the round, two runs per pairing with lead and chase swapped. The top five qualifiers all had byes into the Top 16, so the first round sorted the lower seeds, and five of its eight contested battles went to the lower seed: Itoyama beat ninth-qualifier Ryusuke Aoki (青木竜介, #109); Keito Butsusaka (佛坂圭人, #60), 21st, beat Eita Uehara (上原詠太, #831), 12th, who had been on the podium at Fuji; and Teixeira Luiz (テイシェイラ ルイス, #730), Shoei Tokuyama (徳山昇英, #151) and Fuuga Kimura (木村楓雅, #63) each put out the man seeded above them.

One slot never ran. The organiser’s result notice states that Yusei Iijima (飯島優惺, #707), sixth in qualifying, was disqualified from the Top 32 tournament after a serious rule violation was confirmed during tandem practice; his slot advanced as a bye run, so Kazuyuki Tomite (冨手和行, #210) went from his Top 32 win over MINAMI (#373) straight into the Top 8 without a Top 16 battle. The same notice says Iijima keeps the 4 qualifying points and 16 Top 32 points that were fixed when qualifying ended, 20 in total. It does not describe the violation, so neither will we.

Nakamura’s route from his bye was Butsusaka in the Top 16, Kaito Aoki in the Top 8 and then Kobayashi, the top qualifier, in the semi-final. Mogi came up the other half past Tokuyama, Tomite and Mizuno, who had beaten HINATO (#620) and second-qualifier JAYCE to get there. The official sheet lists outcomes, not the judges’ scores, so we will not invent them: Nakamura won the final, and 4 qualifying points plus 100 for the win gave him 104, his second FDJ2 victory in a row after Suzuka Twin in Round 2. Mogi’s 85 was the biggest score of his season so far. Kobayashi and Mizuno both took 64 battle points for losing a semi-final, and the bracket names Kobayashi third, 71 with his 7 points for P1 against Mizuno’s 67. Itoyama, the last man into the bracket, beat eighth-qualifier Kiminobu Deguchi (出口公信, #193) in the Top 16 and ended the day eighth on 50, from a driver who had scored 19 points across the first two rounds.

The bracket: which battles are worth rewatching?

Mizuno’s run is the one to go back for: tenth in qualifying on 71, he beat Hideki Nono (野々英喜, #789), then HINATO, then JAYCE, the championship’s other big scorer, before Mogi stopped him in the semi-final. JAYCE’s Top 8 exit was worth 54 points, and as the next table shows it turned a three-point title fight into a 53-point one.

Who leads the FDJ2 championship after Round 3?

The official 2026 FDJ2 standings page on formulad.jp carries a column per round, and by 7 September 2026 it already included Round 4 at Sportsland SUGO, so its total column is no use for a Round 3 snapshot. The table below is our sum of the official Round 1, 2 and 3 columns from that page; the before-Ebisu column is Rounds 1 and 2 added the same way.

Three rounds, two winners: JAYCE at Fuji, Nakamura at Suzuka Twin and again at Ebisu. The two of them had shared the opening podium in April, JAYCE on the top step:

The scale, read off the result sheet, is 100 battle points for the win, then 80, 64, 48, 32 and 16 for each earlier exit and 1 for missing the cut, plus 7 for qualifying P1 down to 2 for the last driver in, so each of the three rounds still to come was worth up to 107: a lead of 53, not a decision. How that scoring differs from D1’s is in our D1GP vs Formula Drift Japan comparison.

Where can you watch the replay?

Saturday’s qualifying and Sunday morning’s Top 32, with the Itoyama and Butsusaka upsets, are separate uploads on the same channel.

Where the season went next

Round 4 at Sportsland SUGO (Miyagi) ran on 10–11 July 2026 and went to Shoei Tokuyama; Nakamura was second there and JAYCE tenth, which stretched the gap to 103 on the official table. The full report is our FDJ2 Rd.4 SUGO results.

The next FDJ2 round you can still be at is Round 5 at Okuibuki Motorpark (Shiga) on Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 September 2026, the asphalt car parks of the Gransnow Okuibuki ski resort in Maibara; the official pages call it Okuibuki Motorpark for FDJ2 and Gransnow Okuibuki for the top-class round the weekend before, and it is the same place. Admission is ¥3,500 a day at the gate plus ¥1,500 for a car or ¥1,000 for a motorcycle, all sold on the day only with no advance sale, and a second day means a second ticket, which still makes it cheaper to watch than the senior round on the same site. The finale, FDJ2 Round 6, is at Okayama International Circuit (Okayama) on Friday 2 and Saturday 3 October 2026, sharing the weekend with the top class’s decider on 3–4 October.

Getting up the valley is the part that goes wrong. As our Okuibuki venue guide sets out, the bus the resort’s own pages still list from Ōmi-Nagaoka Station was abolished in 2020; what runs now is a weekday-only Maichan Bus and a shared taxi you book by phone, both of which stop at Kōzuhara short of the gate, and the ¥1,500 station shuttle from JR Maibara or Ōmi-Nagaoka is a ski-season product with no green-season equivalent published. The pickup from Kōzuhara that the resort’s FAQ offers is a prior-notice phone call in Japanese, on a number that appears on no English page.

Every remaining 2026 date, FDJ2, FDJ and D1 alike, sits on the event calendar, rechecked against the official pages each month, and if Ebisu itself is on your list, the route from Tokyo is its own guide.