1977: Kunimitsu Takahashi makes oversteer cinematic

Moment in drift history · JP

A former GP motorcycle world champion turned touring car driver, Takahashi rides the rear out of corners at Fuji and Suzuka in a style nobody has named yet. Japanese readers later call the technique "drift", and Takahashi the godfather.

Takahashi had won the German Grand Prix as a 250cc motorcycle racer in 1961, the first Japanese rider ever to take a world-championship GP. By the 1970s he had moved to touring cars in the All-Japan series. The driving style he developed at Fuji and Suzuka used the rear of the car as a steering input. Nobody on the grid was doing it on purpose; he was.

The technique read on camera as deliberately sliding through corners rather than gripping them. Japanese motorsport media of the era began documenting his lines obsessively. Other drivers studied the footage. Keiichi Tsuchiya, then in his teens, was one of them, the AE86 touge style he would build a decade later was a direct inheritance.

The drift discipline as a category does not formally exist yet in 1977. The chassis-control language that becomes the discipline is born in this driver, on these laps, in this car. Every modern professional drifter can be traced through the technique back to Takahashi.