Keiichi Tsuchiya

Keiichi Tsuchiya (2008)

Keiichi Tsuchiya (土屋 圭 市Tsuchiya Kei'ichi ; born January 30, 1956 in Tōmi Nagano ) is a Japanese professional racing driver.

Because of its unconventional drifts , Tsuchiya is known as the Drift King or Dorikin (ド リ キ ン) and has helped drifting gain unprecedented popularity around the world. Tsuchiya is also known for driving so-called Touge routes. The vehicle he uses most often is a Toyota AE86 Sprinter Trueno (also known as “Hachi-Roku” in Japan, which means “eight six”). A video called “Pluspy” documents Tsuchiya's driving over Touge passes with his AE86.

biography

Tsuchiya started his career in 1977 in the Fuji Freshman Series. Unlike most of the drivers, who either had rich families or a motorsport background, Tsuchiya learned his driving technique on public roads and quickly became a street racing legend.

Racing career

National championships

He started in the Japanese Formula 3 Championship and the Japanese Touring Car Championship . Initially driving a Ford Sierra Cosworth, he later switched to a Nissan Skyline GT-R and took part in the Group A championship. He also drove a Honda Civic in the super touring car championship.

Le Mans

In 1995 Tsuchiya was able to take a class win in a Honda NSX at the Le Mans 24 Hours and take eighth place overall. In 1999 he started in a Toyota GT-One . Despite an involuntary crash of his teammate Ukyo Katayama in the last hour of the race, the team was able to achieve second place and the fastest lap of the entire race.

NASCAR

Tsuchiya competed in several NASCAR-compliant round and oval track races from 1995 to 1998, including a. at the Suzuka Thunder 100 , the Coca-Cola 500K at the Twin Ring Motegi and at the California Speedway .

After the resignation

After retiring as an active racing driver, Tsuchiya stayed in racing and was instrumental in founding and organizing the D1 Grand Prix, the world's first professional drift series. He also acted in the role of judge from the beginning of the series in 1999 to December 2010. Furthermore, until 2005 he was team director of the ARTA JGTC team in the GT500 and GT300 class of the Japanese GT Championship, today's Super GT . Tsuchiya owned the chassis manufacturer Kei Office until 2005 , to which he owes his typical green driver overalls and helmet.

Tsuchiya is a host and moderator in several video magazines, including a. Best Motoring , Hot Version , Video Option and Drift Tengoku . The topic is mostly Japanese vehicles and their tuning options as well as drifting and the D1 Grand Prix series in general. He also worked on the two anime Initial D and Wangan Midnight , in which he partially appears himself. Since 1995 Tsuchiya has occasionally been commenting on Formula 1 races for the Japanese broadcaster Fuji TV .

Tsuchiya has a cameo as a fisherman in the film The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift in the harbor, where the protagonist practices drifting. He comments on the attempts with “ カ ウ ン タ ー ス テ ア が 遅 い だ な？ ” (“Your counter-steering is too late”). He was also involved in the film as a stunt coordinator and stunt performer .

statistics

Le Mans results

year	team	vehicle	Teammate	Teammate	placement	Failure reason
1994	Kremer Honda Racing	Honda NSX	Kunimitsu Takahashi	Akira Iida	Rank 18
1995	Team Kunumitsu Honda	Honda NSX	Kunimitsu Takahashi	Akira Iida	Rank 8 and class win
1996	Team Kunumitsu Honda	Honda NSX	Kunimitsu Takahashi	Akira Iida	Rank 16
1997	Team Lark McLaren	McLaren F1 GTR	Akihiko Nakaya	Gary Ayles	failure	accident
1998	Toyota Motorsports	Toyota GT-One	Toshio Suzuki	Ukyō Katayama	Rank 9
1999	Toyota Motorsports	Toyota GT-One	Toshio Suzuki	Ukyō Katayama	Rank 2 and class win
2000	TV Ashai Team Dragon	Panoz LMP-1 Roadster S.	Masahiko Kondo	Akira Ida	Rank 8

Web links

Commons : Keiichi Tsuchiya  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Official Homepage (Japanese)
• Keiichi Tsuchiya in the Internet Movie Database (English)