2001: D1 Grand Prix becomes a formal series

Moment in drift history · JP

After years of underground events, drift gets a national championship, judges, rounds, broadcast. The Japanese pro era starts. Imamura, Nomura, Tsuchiya and Tanaka are the first generation of pros with sponsor money behind them.

D1 Grand Prix launched as the first formal national drift championship anywhere in the world. The founders, Keiichi Tsuchiya among them, alongside Daijiro Inada, codified the judging criteria that almost every modern drift series still uses: line, angle, style, proximity.

The 2001 inaugural season ran six rounds across Japanese circuits. The first generation of pros (Manabu Orido, Nobuteru Taniguchi, Youichi Imamura, Kazuhiro Tanaka, Tsuchiya himself) had been competing in grassroots events for years; D1GP gave them a broadcast platform, sponsor money and a formal hierarchy.

The series became the visible centre of Japanese drift through the 2000s. By 2008 Daigo Saito's championship run drew international attention and put D1GP footage on global YouTube. The judging criteria, line / angle / style, became the global template that Formula Drift and Drift Masters both adopted.