1987: Best Motoring films the touge

Moment in drift history · JP

Japanese car magazines start shipping VHS supplements. Drift segments at Tsukuba and on real mountain roads make AE86, KP61 and S13 into national obsessions before the West has heard the word.

Best Motoring launched in 1987 as a VHS supplement to the Japanese print car magazine of the same name. The format was simple: pro drivers, Keiichi Tsuchiya among them, campaigning road cars on Tsukuba Circuit and the Gunma touge network, talking through the lines, the corners, the chassis behaviour.

For drift specifically, Best Motoring was the first long-form documentation of the discipline as a discipline. The touge footage gave a national Japanese audience a visible language for what Tsuchiya and his contemporaries were doing. The AE86 segments in particular turned the chassis into a household name.

The publication ran for thirty years. Its visual conventions, onboard cameras, behind-the-driver shots, lap-time overlays, became the template for almost every modern drift media programme. Hoonigan, RTR Live, Papadakis Racing all inherit from this VHS aesthetic.