First there's nothing: a black screen and engine noise somewhere up the mountain. Then two blue headlights appear at the top of a hairpin, the beam swings across a road covered in black tyre marks, and a Toyota Mark II JZX100 comes down the hill sideways. This is our own behind-the-scenes reel from a night in Japan with the 1320video team, filming a street drifter called OGA.
Let's be clear before anything else: this happened on a public mountain road, and street drifting on public roads is illegal in Japan. We're reporting what we saw that night. Nobody should copy it, and we won't say where it was.
The film
1320video, the American channel best known for drag racing and street car culture, made a full film of the night. Here it is:
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OGA's Toyota Mark II JZX100
The JZX100 Mark II is the late-1990s Toyota four-door that Japanese drifters still love: rear-wheel drive, a straight-six 1JZ under the bonnet in Tourer V form, and a long wheelbase that makes it calm at big angles. OGA's car is a good example of how far you can go with very little. As OGA's crew told 1320video, the engine is stock apart from a TD05 turbo and injectors, for about 350 hp against a factory figure they put at 275 to 280.
The rest of the build, as described in the film: Tein suspension with 45k front and 30k rear spring rates, mostly so it can sit this low without hitting the arches; "1484" steering knuckles from a builder in Chiba with 40 mm extended lower arms; and three-piece rear arms from D-MAX. It runs 215/35R18 tyres on all four corners, and according to his crew a set lasts him about ten minutes, so the spares ride along in the other car.
A mountain he knows by heart
His crew told 1320video that OGA has been drifting for about 11 years, since he got his licence, and that this mountain is his home road: he rode up and down it on a moped as a teenager long before he drove it sideways. They also told the team it is the mountain from Initial D where Takumi took his girlfriend on a date. We'll take their word for it, and our Instagram caption called it one of the iconic Initial D spots too.
The film also shows the drive there, including drifting across the lanes of a highway at speeds the 1320video host put at 140 to 160 km/h, which he called one of the most frightening things he had ever done. On the mountain itself, his verdict after riding along was the opposite: he said he never felt unsafe, because OGA knows the road and the car.
The Cresta joins in
Later in the night a second drifter arrived in a Toyota Cresta, the Mark II's more upmarket sister car, and the two ran tandem up the mountain side by side. As the crew told 1320video, the Cresta is a 1996 car with a digital dash, its 1JZ converted from twin turbos to a single turbo, good for about 450 hp and turned down to about 400. The Mark II lost part of its bumper along the way and got a quick roadside repair, which the film calls "drifter things".
What it means
You can read about the JZX100 as a spec sheet, or you can stand on a dark mountain and hear one. This is the car's real home, and why it still matters. For the same car on a pro grid, see the Mark IIs in our D1GP Ebisu story, and for the Mark II's sister car, the Toyota Chaser JZX100.
Video: One Breath Pictures (behind the scenes); film: 1320video.
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