Nakayama Circuit Drift Days 2026: Dates, Fees and Getting There

Yes, you can drift at Nakayama Circuit in Wake, Okayama — but only on the days its road-course calendar labels グリップ&ドリフト走行会 (grip and drift run day), and there are four of them left in 2026: 21 and 23 September, 12 October and 3 November. A full day costs ¥12,000 per car, entry is taken at the gate on the morning, and no circuit licence is required. Every date, fee and rule below was checked on the official pages on 4 September 2026.

That makes Nakayama the opposite of its neighbour. Bihoku Highland Circuit sells a drift day any morning you turn up; Nakayama sells one four times before the year ends, on holidays, with nothing to reserve and nothing in English. Get the date right and it is one of the cheapest full road courses in western Japan to slide on. Get it wrong and you are watching grip cars.

When can you drift at Nakayama? The calendar, day by day

The circuit runs its own run days and labels each one. Most are 中山サーキット グリップ走行会（ドリフト無） — grip run day, no drifting. Four carry the other label.

Two patterns to plan around. Every drift day is a national holiday, and no ordinary Sunday carries the label. And the grip-only days sit right beside them: 20 and 22 September, 4, 11, 18 and 25 October, and 1 and 23 November are all ドリフト無. Tuesday 22 September is itself a holiday this year, wedged between two, so the three-day block runs drift, grip, drift — turn up on the middle day with a locked diff and you will be politely put in the grip group.

Beyond November the calendar goes quiet: December 2026 shows one unlabelled club day, and the January and February 2027 pages were empty on 4 September. Nakayama publishes month by month, so a drift date more than about three months out does not exist yet. Check the event and track calendar and the circuit’s own page before you commit to flights.

What a Nakayama drift day costs

The grip-and-drift page lists the entry fee; the general fee page lists everything around it. All figures include tax.

The licence looks like a barrier and is not. It costs ¥36,000, lasts a year, and is issued over the counter against a driving licence, two photographs and a hanko — the carved personal seal that stands in for a signature in Japan, which a visitor does not own. You do not need it: ¥12,000 is the general rate, the licence only buys the ¥7,000 rate, and the circuit sells it at a ¥10,000 discount on a run day (¥26,000, or ¥33,000 with the day’s running) to anyone who expects to come back. For one visit, pay ¥12,000 and keep your seal-free life.

How do you book a Nakayama drift day? You don’t — and that is the catch

There is no entry form and no reservation system. The circuit’s notice for a June 2026 grip run day — same fees, same format — spells it out: 9:30 to 16:00 unlimited running for ¥12,000, ¥10,000 from 13:00, ¥2,000 to hire a timer, lunch break 12:00 to 13:00, and the two lines that matter: entry is taken on the day and no licence or similar is needed, so feel free to join. The grip-and-drift page lists no booking method either. You arrive, you pay, you drive.

That is rare in Japan, and it cuts both ways. Because nothing is booked, nothing is written down: the site has no regulations page, no noise limit, no vehicle rules and no kit list. Nothing says whether an overseas licence or an International Driving Permit is accepted, nothing offers a rental car or a ride-along, and none of it exists in English. The office answers on 0869-93-2333 and at [email protected], in Japanese, 9:00–17:00, every day of the year. Note that the site only answers at www.nakayama-circuit.com — the bare domain returns an error, which is why so many directory links to this circuit look dead.

What the track is like

Nakayama opened in 1971 after three years of building and calls itself the fourth-oldest circuit in Japan. It is a road course in a valley with a kart track alongside, and its own course map — a 1989 drawing still published as a PDF — numbers twenty corners, from tight hairpins to long sweepers, with an elevation profile along the bottom of the sheet. What the map does not print is a total length, and no page on the site does either, so lap distance is TBC on official sources. The prefecture’s tourism federation adds parking for 1,500 cars and a five-minute drive from Wake IC.

The format matters more than the layout. Grip cars and drift cars run in separate groups rather than mixed — the event page’s own selling point is running with peace of mind — so you are not sharing a session with someone on a time attack.

Getting to Nakayama from Okayama Station and Wake Station

The circuit’s access page gives one instruction: Sanyo Expressway, Wake IC, turn right immediately, there is a sign. No station, no bus, no taxi. Here is what the official pages around it add.

By train. Wake town’s access page puts JR Wake Station about 30 minutes from Okayama Station on the Sanyo Main Line, and its tourism guide extends that to roughly 1 hour 30 minutes from Shin-Osaka or Hiroshima via the Nozomi shinkansen and a change at Okayama. Wake Station, per JR West, has no staffed ticket office (a machine with operator support runs 8:00–20:00), no lockers and no rental cars, but ICOCA works at the gates.

By bus — weekdays only. Wake town runs fourteen bus routes at ¥200 a ride, none on Saturdays, Sundays or public holidays. One of them, the Katakami–Wake line, has a stop named 中山 (Nakayama) six minutes out of Wake Station South, six times a day each way. The town publishes no walking distance from that stop to the gate, and it is academic anyway: every 2026 drift day is a public holiday, and on a public holiday the bus is parked.

By taxi. Which leaves the taxi. Wake town lists three companies — Wake Taxi 0869-92-0148, Fuji Taxi 0869-92-1129 and Saeki Taxi 0869-88-0073 — and the ride is short: on our map check the circuit is about 2.5 km from the station as the crow flies, towards the interchange. None of the three publishes an English page or an online booking form, so the last leg of a Nakayama trip, like the first, is a phone call in Japanese.

Nakayama or Bihoku: which Okayama drift track fits your trip?

Okayama has two circuits that sell drift running to a visitor with no licence and no club, and they solve different problems.

If your dates are fixed by a flight and a rail pass, Bihoku is the safe answer — our Bihoku Highland guide covers its two courses and winter rates. If you can bend your itinerary to a holiday, Nakayama gives you a full-length, twenty-corner road course for ¥12,000 with the grip traffic kept out of your group, a 30-minute train ride from a shinkansen station, which Bihoku is not. For the rest of the region — including the circuit near Hiroshima that bans drifting outright — read our Chugoku drift tracks guide. If you would rather watch than drive, the Japan Drift Champions series runs its 2026 final at Bihoku on 29 November for ¥500 admission. Every venue here, with its licence, booking and drift flags, is in the track directory.