Formula Drift Japan 2026 Schedule: Season Results, FDJ3 Dates, Access

What is the Formula Drift Japan 2026 schedule?

The top-class season is over. Formula Drift Japan Round 6 at Okayama International Circuit in Mimasaka, Okayama, on 3-4 October 2026 was the finale, and FDJ2 closed its own season at the same circuit on 2-3 October. Koudai Sobagiri won the round and the official FDJ account named him 2026 champion; our Okayama Round 6 results have the full bracket. What is left to watch is FDJ3: Fuji Speedway Drift Park (Shizuoka) on Sunday 18 October and Tsukuruma Circuit Nasu (Tochigi) on Sunday 1 November. All of this was checked on the official pages on 5 October 2026.

Formula Drift Japan is the easiest Japanese drift series for an overseas fan to fall into. The format is the one you already know from the US series, qualifying then head-to-head tandem battles in a knockout bracket, but the paddock is unmistakably Japanese, the cars lean heavily on the SR and JZ canon, and the venues range from a ski resort to a Grand Prix circuit. If you are weighing it against the other big Japanese series, we compared them side by side in D1GP vs Formula Drift Japan.

The 2026 season, round by round

The first half ran at Fuji, Suzuka Twin, Ebisu West and Sportsland Sugo. Every date here comes from the official 2026 schedules and event pages on formulad.jp. Dates can still move, so recheck the event page before you book flights, and use our drift calendar to see what else is running in Japan on the same weekend.

As for next year: no 2027 calendar was on formulad.jp when we checked on 5 October 2026. The 2026 schedule for all three tiers was announced on 17 December 2025, so treat 2027 dates and venues as TBC until the series posts them.

FDJ, FDJ2, FDJ3: the ladder explained

The naming looks cryptic until you see it as a ladder:

• FDJ is the top class, the professional championship, run over six two-day rounds.
• FDJ2 is the development series. Same venues, same judged format, one step down in budget and fame. This is where the next wave earns promotion, and drivers hold an FDJ2 licence issued via the official site.
• FDJ3 is the entry tier: six single-day rounds, several at smaller dedicated drift facilities like Fuji’s Drift Park. It is the closest thing to watching tomorrow’s stars while they are still paying for their own tyres.

The series announces all three tiers together, in one post, in both languages, which is why the calendars line up the way they do:

For a visitor the ladder is a scheduling gift. September turned the Okuibuki area of Shiga into a drift month, with FDJ on the 5th and 6th, FDJ2 the following weekend and FDJ3 on the 20th. The Okuibuki venue itself is worth knowing before a future trip, and we have walked through it in the Okuibuki Motorpark guide.

Who won the 2026 championship?

Koudai Sobagiri (#31). He arrived at Okayama 34 points behind Kazumi Takahashi, topped qualifying, beat Takahashi in the semi-final and Jake Jones (#947) in the final, and took the maximum 107 points for the round. The official FDJ X account named him 2026 series champion on 4 October.

The official standings page on formulad.jp still stopped at Round 5 when we checked on 5 October 2026, so the table below adds the provisional Round 6 points from the official result sheet to the official totals. The title is the series’ own call; the totals are our arithmetic until the page updates.

Three drivers end level on 316 and the standings page does not yet say how the series splits them, so third overall is TBC. The battle-by-battle story is in our Round 6 Okayama report, and the run-in is in Formula Drift Japan 2026 Rd.5 Okuibuki results.

▶ Formula Drift Japan — rules and judging explained FORMULA DRIFT JAPAN · official channel click to load from youtube

How much are tickets for the last FDJ3 rounds?

Not published yet. On 5 October 2026 the ticket line on both remaining FDJ3 event pages, Round 5 at Fuji Speedway Drift Park and Round 6 at Tsukuruma Circuit Nasu, still read “Soon”. The closest reference is FDJ3 Round 1 on the same Fuji site, where the fees stacked:

Treat those as a guide to the shape of the bill, not as the Round 5 price. If a round does sell advance tickets through convenience-store terminals, as the Okayama finale did, the catch for visitors is the same: the machines are inside Japanese stores and the online routes want a Japanese mobile number. We covered how that works in buying Japanese drift event tickets from overseas.

Can you get to the FDJ3 rounds without a car?

Fuji, yes, on a Sunday. Fuji Speedway has no station of its own, but at weekends the Fuji Reien bus line from Suruga-Oyama Station calls at the speedway gates, with 11 services reaching the East Gate between 08:47 and 15:42 in the timetables published on 4 September 2026. Our Fuji Speedway Drift Park guide has the full timetable and where the course sits inside the speedway.

Nasu is harder. Nasu-shiobara is a Tohoku Shinkansen stop, but no scheduled bus reaches Tsukuruma Circuit. The only public link into Takabayashi is Yu-Taku, the city’s reservation-only demand taxi, booked by phone in Japanese; the details are in our Tsukuruma Circuit Nasu guide.

Visitor checklist

One last note on expectations. FDJ events are family-friendly, paddock access is generous by world standards, and the gap between fan and driver is small. It is normal to end the day with photos, a signed something, and opinions about tandem proximity you did not have that morning. The title fight is settled for 2026, but FDJ3 is where next year’s names are still paying for their own tyres.