D1 Grand Prix, Drift Masters 55,000 Record and Red Bull Drifting 2008

At Round 6 of the 2023 season, 55,000 spectators filled PGE Narodowy to watch cars slide sideways, a world record for attendance at a drifting event. The old mark, 25,000, belonged to Formula Drift at Long Beach in 2019. The series that broke it, Drift Masters, began only nine years earlier as a three-round Polish national championship.

Drift Masters is one of three contests that between them tell the story of competition drifting: the D1 Grand Prix, the Japanese series that made the twin-run battle the format everyone copies, Drift Masters, the European series that holds the attendance record, and the Red Bull Drifting World Championship, a non-championship all-star contest held at the Port of Long Beach in 2008.

What is the D1 Grand Prix?

Japan's D1 Grand Prix, known as D1GP and carrying the subtitle Professional Drift, is a drifting series for production cars. It grew out of amateur contests. Daijiro Inada, the founder of Option magazine and the Tokyo Auto Salon, joined forces with the drifting legend Keiichi Tsuchiya to stage a professional-level contest in 1999 and 2000, because the skill of the drivers had outgrown the events they were winning. In October 2000 they turned it into a five-round series.

Its great contribution was the tsuiso, the twin-run battle. Two cars run the course together in a single-elimination tournament, a format borrowed from the street tohge racing that car enthusiasts had long loved. The tsuiso became the standard for drift events around the world, which is why the series is regarded as the benchmark for the sport.

Where did drifting come from?

Drifting traces back to the earliest years of motorsport, when Tazio Nuvolari and other grand prix and dirt-track drivers of the pre-war era threw cars into a four-wheel drift. Racing tyres of the 1960s to the 1980s, built with bias-ply construction, suited a style with a high slip angle, and as Japanese professionals drove that way, so did the street racers. Carboy magazine held one of the first drifting contests in 1986. In 1989, the year after the Video Option series first appeared, Inada introduced a rival event judged by Tsuchiya.

As the standard of drivers climbed and a few began to dominate, Inada decided to create a series for the most skilled. In 2000 it appeared as the All Japan Professional Drift Championship, with Tsuchiya and Manabu Orido judging, Manabu Suzuki commentating, and Takayasu Ozaku, better known as Zaku the cameraman, filming it for years afterwards.

The first D1 Grand Prix events

The first event took place at Ebisu Circuit in Fukushima in October 2000, with forty entries and three thousand spectators. Each driver was marked alone, and the event counted as the first round of the 2001 season, which was soon renamed the D1 Grand Prix. From round two the series switched to one-to-one tsuiso battles. Parts makers BLITZ, HKS and A'PEXi began sponsoring drivers soon after.

D1 Grand Prix goes abroad

The series stayed in Japan until 2003, when an exhibition round at Irwindale Speedway in Southern California was produced by Slipstream Global, a marketing company from the United States. Also in 2003, Grassroots Motorsports gave D1GP its Editors' Choice Award. Slipstream Global would go on to create Formula Drift in 2004, and the Irwindale round, which drew a sellout crowd of ten thousand and broke the venue and series record, became that year's opening round.

The car accessories chain Autobacs became title sponsor in 2004, and the series ran its first non-circuit event at Odaiba, in a Fuji Television car park, in January of that year. In December it held a non-championship US versus Japan event on the infield road course at California Speedway in Fontana. Orido stepped down as a judge at the end of that season to become a driver.

Foreign drivers had a hard time at first. At the opening round of 2005, Rhys Millen was the first driver from outside Japan to reach the best eight, after Masato Kawabata spun during their battle, but he lost to Yasuyuki Kazama in a sudden-death run. In October 2005 an exhibition at Silverstone in England drew five thousand people, and Ireland's Darren McNamara reached the best eight there, passing the series regular Hiroshi Fukuda, before Kazama beat him too. A UK national series followed in 2006.

The first non-Japanese winner of both car and driver came at the non-championship Irwindale exhibition in December 2005: Vaughn Gittin Jr. in a Ford Mustang GT. In the March 2006 season opener, Samuel Hubinette's Dodge Viper SRT/10 beat Gittin in a sudden-death battle to reach the best eight and went on to the semi-final, where Nobushige Kumakubo's Subaru Impreza beat him. Kazama then won the final, his third successive first-round victory.

During 2006 the series spread to Malaysia and New Zealand by way of driver search events. After the UK exhibition, Tsuchiya invited three British-series drivers to the final rounds. McNamara was the only one to qualify for the points rounds in his own car, reaching the quarter-finals twice before Ken Nomura eliminated him. After the UK franchise ended, McNamara moved to the US series.

Leadership changes and later years

Hisashi Kamimoto retired from driving in 2007 to become a judge. Video Option has covered every official D1GP event since the series began, with its English-language sister JDM Option, established in 2004, also reporting. In 2007 J Sports ESPN started showing highlights. Management of the US arm changed hands in 2009, and Tsuchiya, who sat on the executive board, stepped down. In December 2010 Tsuchiya and Inada both resigned, citing consistently irresponsible management.

The following season was the first without either of them. Kamimoto became chief judge, and Youichi Imamura won his fourth and final title, the most D1GP championships won by any driver. In 2014 nitrous oxide was banned, which pushed teams towards larger turbochargers or bigger engines. Since 2018 D1GP has streamed every round, along with its D1 Lights feeder series, free on YouTube in Japanese and English. A project called "Next 10 Years", launched in 2022, aims to make the competition more enjoyable, easier for teams to enter and fairer and safer.

The old attendance record for a drifting event was 25,000, set by Formula Drift at Long Beach in 2019; Drift Masters doubled it.

How does a D1 Grand Prix event work?

Japanese drivers earn a place by topping the table in one of four national series: the Advan Drift Meeting, the A'PEX Cup, the ORC Drift Championship or the BN Sports D1 Drift Championship. Elsewhere, drivers enter a Driver Search and, once they qualify, receive a D1 Licence.

A championship round is typically limited to one hundred cars. Each gets three solo (tansou) runs, and only the best counts. The top twenty qualifiers join ten seeded cars, taken from the top ten in the championship table. Judging uses a DriftBox that measures angle, line and speed, and a run can score up to 100.0, with a bonus point for a perfect score. The sixteen best then meet in tsuiso battles, with the top scorer facing the sixteenth, the second facing the fifteenth and so on.

In a battle, the leader usually drifts at maximum angle while shutting the inside line. The chaser drifts at a smaller angle but stays very close. What matters is who produces the more exciting drift, not who has the cleaner line, so a car left behind on the straight can still win with a beautiful slide. A spin, understeer or collision means disqualification and zero for that battle. The winner receives a large trophy and a bottle of champagne, and a cheque worth 1 million yen, or $5000 at US events. Until 2004 the losing semi-finalists also ran a third-place playoff.

What is Drift Masters?

Drift Masters, which goes by DM, DMGP or DMEC, is a drifting series that began in Europe in 2014. Many regard it as the continent's largest, and among the largest anywhere. At the end of each season it awards a championship to the driver and the country with the most points, and since 2024 a Rookie of the Year award has gone to the best finisher in a debut season.

Drift Masters Grand Prix, 2014 to 2017

Dawid Karkosik and Tomasz Chwastek founded Drift Masters Grand Prix in 2014, announcing it at a press conference at the Marriott Hotel in Warsaw. It began as a Polish national series with three rounds, at PGE Arena in Gdansk, MotoArena in Torun and a street circuit in Karpacz. A Drivers Search on 24 and 25 May 2014 at Debrzno Aerodrome picked the field. The season prize pool was 120,000 Polish zloty, with 40,000 shared among the top five at each round, and Piotr Wiecek won the first round by beating Bartosz Stolarski in the final.

By 2015 there were twelve rounds at six locations, although one in Walbrzych was cancelled. In 2016 the series held its first international round, at the Biernieki Sports Complex in Riga, Latvia, which Poland's Pawel Borkowski won to earn the title "King of Riga". For the first time, all rounds including qualifying were shown on television, on the Polish channel nSport+.

Double-header weekends ended in 2017, cutting the calendar from twelve rounds to six. The main competition grew from a Top 16 to a Top 32, the prize pool per round was set at EUR 40,000, and the final round went to the Hockenheimring, which had once hosted Formula One. Adam Zalewski won the title, the first driver other than Wiecek to do so. Wiecek missed the season, having joined Formula Drift in the United States with the Worthouse Drift Team alongside James Deane.

The European Championship years

In 2018 the series became the Drift Masters European Championship. The rebrand was the idea of Arkadiusz Dudko, who took over as CEO after a strategic alignment with Zigen Promotions, the organisation that runs the Irish and British drift championships. Zigen's chief executive, Dave Egan, later commentated alongside Ian Waddington.

The same year DMEC struck a partnership with Formula Drift. The top eight DMEC drivers were awarded Formula Drift PRO licences, and every Formula Drift driver received a Drift Masters licence. James Deane became the first non-Polish champion, winning five of the six rounds, and the same season he took the Formula Drift title, the only driver to win both in one year.

In 2019 Red Bull Media House announced a partnership, and every round was broadcast live on Red Bull TV with commentary in four languages: English, Polish, Turkish and Arabic. The pandemic then cut the calendar. Six rounds were planned for 2020, but once the Austrian round fell through and the others were postponed, the championship was cancelled, leaving the DMEC King of Riga as the only event. In 2021 five rounds were planned and four were held, a pair at the PS Racing Center in Greinbach, Austria, and a pair on the Biernieki Trase in Riga. A final round in the centre of Tbilisi, Georgia, was cancelled. A full six-round season returned in 2022 with nothing cancelled.

Then came the record. Round 6 of 2023 at PGE Narodowy drew 55,000 spectators, more than double the 25,000 that Formula Drift had drawn at Long Beach in 2019.

Drift Masters from 2024

In 2024 the series removed "European Championship" from its name, reflecting a wish to become a global series. It was also the tenth anniversary, and a qualifying showdown pitted the four best qualifiers against each other for up to four extra points. A seven-round calendar was planned for 2025, a first for the series, but the opening round at Vallelunga Circuit near Rome was cancelled because of the death of Pope Francis. That season was the first since 2018 without Egan as commentator, as he chose to concentrate on driving full time in the series. Formula Drift commentator Jacob Gettins replaced him. For 2026 the Qualifying Showdown was dropped and the series went back to a traditional qualifying format.

How does Drift Masters scoring work?

Each round opens with qualifying. Drivers get two runs, judged by three judges, and up to 100 points are on offer: 60 for line, 20 for angle and 20 for style. Style splits into initiation (5), fluidity (10) and commitment (5). The top eight qualifiers earn points, from eight for first down to one for eighth. Anyone placing 33rd or lower is out.

The top 32 go into tandem battles, matched by qualifying position, so first faces 32nd, second faces 31st and so on. In each battle one driver leads and throws down a qualifying-style run while the other tries to mirror it, and then roles reverse. The judges choose who advances. If they cannot split the pair they may call a "One More Time", at most once per battle.

• Top 32 exit: 16 points, classified 17th to 32nd
• Top 16 exit: worth 32 points and 9th to 16th place
• Beaten in the Top 8: 48 points, placing 5th to 8th
• Fourth place earns 64 points and third place 76
• The runner-up collects 88 and the winner 100

In 2025 the three main judges were Mateusz Dziedzic, Vernon Zwaneveld and David Kalas, who rotate the role of head judge at each round. Maciej Polody is competition director. The championship's official statistics exclude anything before 2018.

What was the Red Bull Drifting World Championship?

Energy drink maker Red Bull sponsored this all-star drifting contest, which carried no championship status, and IMG and Slipstream Global Marketing, the organisers behind Formula D, ran it. Its home was the Port of Long Beach in California, over the weekend of 15 and 16 November 2008. It was announced before the Las Vegas Formula D round on 14 July and carried $50,000 in prize money, billed as the largest in a drifting contest, along with the largest television production for a drift event. Rhys Millen, who happened to be sponsored by Red Bull, won the inaugural event and $25,000.

Who got in?

There were 32 places. Drivers qualified by finishing in the Formula D top 16, by winning a listed overseas championship, or by being a past D1GP title holder or the winner of the Formula D Singapore exhibition. The listed series were D1NZ and the NZ Drift Series in New Zealand, the Drift Mania Canadian Championship, Drift Australia, the European Drift Championship in the United Kingdom, the International Drift Series in Germany, the Pro Drift European Series in Ireland, the Nordic Drifting Championship and the D1 Grand Prix in Japan. Runners-up could take any spare places.

The Pier S course

The organisers laid new asphalt over a 90-acre (360,000 m2) lot at the Port of Long Beach for a course called Pier S. The whole venue was built from nothing, including three grandstands borrowed from the Long Beach Grand Prix and 2,000 VIP and sponsor seats, with room for 25,000 spectators. The track was 370 m (1,200 ft) long with another 30 m (100 ft) for a rolling start, and six corners were marked out by a Red Bull sign. Drivers who tested it reportedly reached 167 km/h (104 mph).

The invitation row

Each series except Formula D was allotted two entries, and D1GP, after negotiation, was given six. Then talks broke down, and D1 drivers were discouraged from accepting. Formula D management approached them directly and found that invited entrants, particularly former D1GP champions, had to decline. Kumakubo was due at a drift demonstration in Dubai, and Kazama, who was no longer involved in the series, cited a schedule clash. Orido was competing in the WTCC race at Macau that weekend, and fellow judge and returning competitor Taniguchi was in a Super Taikyu race in Japan. Imamura could not attend, and Kawabata declined, though a "conflict of interest" was said to be the true reason. Saito, who first accepted, also withdrew for that reason, although it was rumoured he had put two cars in a container bound for the event. Millen backed the claim that the organisation had used bullying tactics. Among Formula D drivers, only Tuerck declined, for budget reasons, because he lacked a title sponsor, and Mohan took his place. The remaining slots went to Santos, Bolger and Ruiterman.

How do the three drifting events compare?

What changes are D1GP and Drift Masters making?

D1GP's "Next 10 Years" project, begun in 2022, is its plan for the coming decade. Drift Masters says it wants to become a global series, and for 2026 it dropped the Qualifying Showdown and went back to a traditional qualifying format.