Initial D - Everything You Need To Know | Up to Speed

- It's just after 4:00 a.m. m. and you're driving down the mountain in your sick yellow racing FD RX7, after a long night preparing for a race next weekend. Career? Pfft, the race will be over before it starts. You look in your mirror to admire your perfect 90s JDM pretty boy haircut. That's when you notice the headlights. It must be a local looking to fight, because they are gaining ground quickly. “Nice drive,” you say to yourself. But after two curves, I won't even see you in my mirror. You downshift and slam the starter pedal, shooting a fireball out the exhaust pipe.

Oh! Then he digs his heel into second, gives it the beans, and drifts through a right-hand curve. To your surprise, you are in a tandem drift with an 86? How the hell can this jalopy keep up with your finely tuned road racing machine? And the driver yawns? No way, he must be yelling because now he is passing you in the braking zone by a hairpin. Hey fool, do you have a death wish? Then something crazy happens. (Tires screech) The Toyota pulls off a perfect coasting slide through the hairpin like a rally pro. Who is this boy? Colin McRae?

And just like that he left. Did you just see a ghost? Well, what we just saw was a scene from a Japanese cartoon whose influence is so profound that it almost single-handedly brought drift to America. (engines revving) What if I told you that this cartoon was inspired by a real underground street racing scene? And its main character was based on a real person whose passion for driving turned the automotive world upside down. Who the hell is this real person? And how much garbage are you getting into if the police see this? This is

everything

you

need

to

know

to get up to

speed

with "Initial D." (cars whirring) (upbeat music) Many thanks to carparts.com for sponsoring today's video. - Have you finished cousin James? - Not yet, friend, I'm still working on it.

My clumsy cousin Carl is very excited about Halloween this year. And if he goes trick-or-treating, even though he's a grown man, that means I have four to six hours of peace and quiet. I've been dreaming about this for months. - Hurry cousin, I want everyone to see my costume! -And since he will be driving at night, I had to do something with these old broken headlights. Lucky for me, there is carparts.com. They make it quick and easy to find the parts you

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when you need them, including new headlights. Alright, buddy, I'm done. Are you ready Carl? -Who the hell is Carl?

Ask Michael if he's ready. -He's okay, weird. Michael, are you ready to go? ♪ I am a hurricane, I bring thunder and ♪ (hits on the head) Ah. (bell rings) (toolbox rattles) (mallet bangs) Are we serious? - Wow genius cousin, that was terrifying. - Well, you

know

, Halloween is scary. - Is? Because Meema said it was all about candy and dressing like Michael McDowell. - It's one of our strangest family traditions. So whether you're getting a complete overhaul or just installing new headlights, carparts.com will make your vehicle look good and run like new without breaking the bank.

So head over to carparts.com today. - Do you know what cousin? I don't think I'm going trick-or-treating this year. I'll stay and hang out with you. - Excellent! - You know, I heard that if you connect Sorcerer's Stone and Certified Lover Boy, it's a real trip. - "Initial D" was created in 1995 by award-winning Japanese comic artist Shuichi Shigeno. Set in 1990 Kanto. (tires squeal) In the touge, our hero Takumi ascends to legendary status race after race defeating increasingly intimidating drivers in a dream roster of JDM cars far more capable than his Toyota AE86 Trueno. As an 86 owner, let me tell you, you would need mad skills to beat most of these cars in an 86.

At its core, "Initial D" is a classic underdog story. No one would give a damn about Takumi if he had a horizon. The 86 has flaws, strengths, limitations and quirks of character, that is, personality. ♪ Headlights that go up and down ♪ He is as much the hero of the story as he is. And the prices right now reflect that. This one just sold for $40,000 on Bring A Trailer. It's a Corolla from the eighties! For an 18-year-old, Takumi is preternaturally talented behind the wheel. And that's all thanks to his dad. He delivers tofu to a hotel on top of Mount Akina every morning in '86, and since then he learned to drive in seventh grade!

To protect his livelihood from splashing around in the trunk, Takumi's father, Bunta, taught him to drive with a glass of water in the cupholder and asked him not to spill a drop. It's not easy, but he masters it. He then starts driving faster and faster. And when we enter the world of "Initial D", 18-year-old Takumi Fujiwara is the fastest driver of the Akina touge, although he doesn't know it. - Do you even know what it means, Mr. Shore? - Strange origin story, right? Doesn't that seem oddly specific? Hmm. Let me introduce you to our main character in the real world, Mr.

Keiichi Tsuchiya. He is a famous Japanese racing driver, motorsports promoter and television personality. And he's as synonymous with drifting and the Toyota 86 as Takumi is, which is saying something. Tsuchiya is known as the Drift King. And he worked as a consultant on “Initial D,” both the manga and the anime. And that's why the technical aspects are so spot on. There are entire pages dedicated to car specifications in the manga. And in the anime, each car clearly sounds like it's its real-world counterpart. (car hums) Which is more than "The Fast and the Furious" can say. In fact, "Initial D" is the main inspiration for this show.

Basically, each episode just explains how a different car works. Realism and attention to detail played a huge role in the explosion of popularity of Initial D. I'm going to say it, okay? Without Tsuchiya, "Initial D" probably wouldn't exist at all. Because Tsuchiya was much more than a technical consultant, I dare say that he was the inspiration for "Initial D". Now, the creator of "Initial D" has never directly confirmed that he based the series on Tsuchiya's true coming-of-age story, but the parallels are shockingly uncanny. I don't have a law degree, but I'm going to plead the case.

Well? Exhibit A, His Honor, Keiichi Tsuchiya learned to drive while he made deliveries for the family business just like Takumi Fujiwara. Young Tsuchiya wasn't delivering tofu, but the molten metal on the back of his delivery car could cause serious damage when moving down the curvy mountain road. So he had to learn to drive smoothly. Keiichi Tsuchiya was born in 1956 in Tomi, Nagano Prefecture, just 24 kilometers from one of Japan's most legendary roads, the Usui Pass. Unlike Takumi, who didn't give a damn about racing before his father basically forced him to, Tsuchiya loved racing from a young age.

He grew up watching his hero, Kunimitsu Takahashi, slide his Skyline GTR around the circuits of the Japan Touring Car Championship. Now, this was the late sixties and even the best bias-ply tires of the time didn't have poop grip. So drifting was an effective technique on the track. And Takahashi was a master. His lateral style captivated young Tsuchiya, who knew at that moment that he was going to be a racing driver. I personally knew he was going to work at Donut from a very young age when a dog told me in a parking lot. (the dog barks) How did you know?

He just knew it. Unsurprisingly, growing up so close to a legendary mountain also influenced Tsuchiya's career dreams. Street racers, or hashiriya as they are called in Japan, came from all over to attack the Usui touge in the early hours of the morning. Close your eyes for a second, okay? Don't really do it, because it's a video, but imagine all those glorious full-throttle moans reverberating off the mountainside across the valley. And the open window in young Tsuchiya's bedroom probably had paper walls and stuff, night after night, year after year. And with all those high-performance howls burrowing into his young, dormant subconscious, Tsuchiya was destined for the life of street racing.

Time flies, as she usually does, she is a fickle lover. And even if you don't know it, he's a teenager now. And he has a driver's license and a need for

speed

! He's gotta kick some tires and light some fires! But even in the reckless days of adolescence, he knew that his local pass was nothing unpleasant, okay? You're not doing anything wrong with the Usui Pass! Don't mess with that! Take it from me. You can go broke with too many passes. If you try to screw up this specific pass when you're young, you'll be dirty from the start.

You'll beat your butt! And you know what you don't want? Sprout your crap when you're too young, that's for adults. Only adults should spout their filth, and only if they want to. Well? So this pass that you don't want to mess with is made up of more than 180 curves on 7 1/2 miles of road. Being a beginner here is a death wish, so young Tsuchiya trained on the more forgiving mountain roads nearby. And after four years of dedicated training, including a near-fatal accident, he finally made his street racing debut after Usui's relentless technical hit. He quickly rose through the ranks and became one of the best drivers in the whole damn mountain, which brings me to exhibit B.

Your honor, Keiichi Tsuchiya is a great legend, as is Takumi Fujiwara. Word spread about Tsuchiya's prowess on the touge and riders from all over the region came to challenge him and his friends on his own turf, just like in "Initial D". And like Takumi, Keiichi was a force to be reckoned with, only he didn't drive an 86 because they hadn't been made yet. He drove a Skyline 2000 GT, or as I like to call it, a Skyline 2gt. Follow the money, 2000GT, touge. In "Initial D", Takumi didn't so much choose the career life as it chose him. The driver of that yellow RX7 he dusted off on the way home from a delivery was a big deal.

His name was Keisuke Takahashi, second in command of the Akagi RedSuns, a serious street racing team known for destroying racers in a cold and calculated manner. The RedSuns planned to do exactly that, with Takumi's friends the Akina Speed ​​Stars. But, in the surprise battle with what he calls Akina's 86th ghost, Keisuke found his ideal challenger. - There's no way I'm going to let this go on like this. - So he called this mysterious driver to fight him in the Akina downhill next weekend! Takumi shows up, but only because his father won't let him borrow her car for a date unless he wins the race, which he does, but it wasn't easy.

In fact, it was the first time Takumi had to try something in a long time. A switch flips somewhere inside him and news of the Akina 86 spreads across Japan's street racing scene. Now Tak gradually embraces racing, battling against increasingly advanced drivers and JDM cars to defend his record at Mount Haruna. Don't you mean Mount Akina? Oh, did I say Mount Haruna? I meant to say Mount Akina, although it's not a big deal, because they are the same place. So Usui Pass isn't the only "Initial D" location drawn from the real world. Does this path look familiar to you?

If you are a fan of "Initial D", you should do it. This is Mount Akina in real life, also known as Mount Haruna. Hello planes, an express ticket to Japan. Uh, make that two tickets. Uh, actually I'm going with my girlfriend. So I thought it would be a little weird if you were third all the time. Plus, I have medically fat elbows, so you probably don't want to sit next to me. Alright. Basically, all of "Initial D" is set in real places in Japan. Takumi's hometown, City-S, is the real-life city of Shibukawa. Here's the damn gas station he worked at.

Even the small details, like the strange swan boats on Lake Akina, are real. Sadly, the tofu shop that they modeled the Fujiwara store after was torn down in 2010 to make way for a new development. But the iconic sign was saved and is on display in a museum. Tsuchiya's reputation as a touge terror spread to Japan's professional racing teams, who were intrigued enough to give him a try. And in 1977 he made his professional racing debut in the Fuji Freshmen Series, which leads me to exhibit C Your Honor, Keiichi Tsuchiya is famous for drifting an 86, as is a certain Mr.

Takumi Fujiwara. Keiichi Tsuchiya's professional career didn't take off until he got behind the wheel of the right machine. And he met his vehicular soulmate in 1984. I'm talking about the Toyota AE86, an affordable, lightweight, rear-drive sports car powered by a 1.6-liter dual-overhead-cam inline four-cylinder engine and highrevolutions coded for a GE. Tsuchiya's first 86 was the number two ADVAN motorsports Sprinter Trueno carrot. And he took eight wins in the 1984 Fuji Freshman Series. He was an absolute animal behind the wheel of that 86, annihilating Skylines in the class above him so often that Nismo required racing officials to examine his car for signs of of trap.

Of course they found nothing. But racing fans found something, and that something was a hero. ♪ I could be your hero, baby ♪ ♪ I can take away your pain ♪ ♪ I'd be by your side forever ♪ ♪ You can take my breath away ♪ Now he was in front so often that he began throwing long, graceful drifts to keep the crowd entertained. spectators. He worked and people went crazy for his side antics. And the sincerely titled magazine "CARBOY" gave him a nickname, Dorikin, which translates as Drift King. A less erotic-sounding Japanese car magazine also noted Tsuchiya's striking driving style. The founder of "Option" magazine, Daijiro GoGo Inada, found a cylinder in the Drift King.

Now, Inada doesn't really have a parallel character in "Initial D," but she's almost as crucial to the creation of him as Tsuchiya is. His publications "Option, Option 2" and "Video Option" introduced car enthusiasts across Japan to the street racing lifestyle. Inada himself was a street racer. In fact, the first issue of "Option" featured a super controversial cover photo of a guy running in the street. And despite his growing success on the professional circuit, Tsuchiya was still active in that scene. Inada knew this and proposed an idea. What if they made a video of him driving? So Gogo Inada, Tsuchiya the Drift King, and "CARBOY" magazine teamed up with Kala Sports Suspension and a tuning company called Pluspy to produce three direct-to-VHS movies that would alter the automotive enthusiast landscape forever.

We are talking about the first replayable drifting videos. This is something very fucked up. This is like the first videos! The videos were titled The Touge, The Touge Part 2 and West of Sendai. But they are known collectively as Pluspy. It's beautiful and blatantly illegal. In fact, it gives Tsuchiya a temporary suspension of his competition license for racing on public roads. All unsold copies were pulled from shelves in response, but it was too late as enthusiasm was already slack. Nolan had a stroke once, we gave him some milk of magnesia and he cleared it up right away.

Pluspy, with the help of "Option" and "CARBOY" magazines, introduced the magic of drifting to greater Japan, ushering in the outlawed golden age depicted in "Initial D." Now, when "Initial D" debuted in 1995 as a serialized comic in Tokyo's weekly magazine "Young," drift was already a true phenomenon. It wasn't intended to be taken seriously at first, but the gorgeous art, relatable coming-of-age story, and attention to technical details drew readers in. The weekly magazine "Young" was aimed at Japanese men in their teens and early twenties, a good portion of whom also read "Option" and watch DK's drift videos. When the magazine's editor put this all together, he asked the creators of "Initial D" to expand the series into an ongoing manga saga.

And the success of the manga prompted an anime series adaptation in 1998, which blew up like my Dms after I posted that photo of me and Drake on Instagram going crazy in Ibiza. Check it out, it's fucking cool. He has a million likes. He's on my Instagram @jamespumphrey. Keep scrolling, he's there. Drifting and "Initial D" landed on American shores around the same time in the early 2000s. Los Angeles-based anime distributor Tokyopop picked up the rights for English distribution in 2002. The show and manga They gained immediate traction among Western car enthusiasts. But Tokyopop's releases were not, shall we say, fully representative of the original work.

The anime's iconic eurobeat soundtrack was replaced by a bunch of silly rap songs performed by Tokyopop's CEO. We have a CEO and he doesn't rap about anything. In fact, it's very rare for a CEO to rap about anything, unless you're Jay Z, he's a CEO. He can rap about things. The Japanese translations were also quite dubious. And the gorgeous technical details of Tsuchiya's source were a big mistake. If you've been watching this show for a while, let's just say I get it. It's hard to do

everything

right. In response, frustrated multilingual fans launched their own fansubs with better translations, more accurate technical descriptions, and the soon-to-be-meme eurobeat soundtrack intact. (electronic music) In the past, this was what you had to get.

For many American car enthusiasts, including myself in the early 2000s, the "

initial

D" was their first exposure to drifting. What was this intoxicating vehicular ballet that our friends from the east performed with such violence and grace? It's like "

initial

D" and the drift filled a hole we didn't even know existed. We wanted more, we needed more. So we young car enthusiasts, buzzing and bleary-eyed from too much Adderall and Bawls energy drinks fueled by binge-watching anime, plugged into the same Internet that gave us Takumi's book. I clicked on Yahoo, the best search engine, and typed drift. And holy hucconay, there it was.

Best Motoring, Hot Version, D1 Grand Prix drifting presented by your friend and mine, Keiichi Tsuchiya. He had his hand in all of that. In 2003, a year after Initial D's official English release, the Tsuchiya D1 Grand Prix held its first event in the states, debuting to a sold-out crowd at the Irwindale Speedway in California. This is one of the most interesting things to see, Google it. Is awesome. You can see how the drift reaches the United States. Hollywood took notice, of course, and capitalized on the drifting craze in 2006's "The Fast and Furious Tokyo Drift." Tsuchiya even made a cameo in "Tokyo Drift" as a random fisherman talking to that kid with the terrible skids. of the strange forehead.

It's a cool nod to the OG. I don't think it's necessary to talk about the popularity of drifting in 2021. It's everywhere. Everyone knows the word. Keiichi Tsuchiya arguably influenced modern car culture more than any single person over the past 35 years. But he couldn't have done it without "Initial D." Alright, compare a list of the most popular JDM cars in America to the "Initial D" list. And while you're at it, compare that list to the first season of "Up To Speed." Of all those incredibly cool cars, why did they choose the 86 as the hero car? The simple answer, they loved it.

But love falls far short of Tsuchiya's relationship with this chassis. So let's go further and say that Tsuchiya realized his destiny in an AE86 and never forgot it. His enduring love for this car made it an icon. And while he sat behind the wheel of many objectively better cars in his racing career, including the Toyota GT1, which he drove to second place overall at the 1999 24 Hours of Le Mans. He always came back to the '86. He explains his fondness for the car in the same way that Bunta does in "Initial D". "It's a car that helps polish and refine your driving." And in this sense the 86 is an ideal companion.

He is attractive, reliable and pushes you to improve yourself. It shows you your limits and helps you overcome them. All of those same qualities make AE86 a fantastic literal plot device. Ultimately, "Initial D" chronicles the evolution of Takumi's relationship with a car as human as he is. That's what makes the series finale so bittersweet. I'm not going to spoil it for you, because if you haven't seen it, I really think you should. We deliberately kept plot details to an absolute minimum, because I really want you to enjoy this as much as I do. And also read the manga, it's very, very good.

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