Say Japan and the next word you think of is Touge and we have plenty of it around Gunma. Gunma was made famous by the well known manga series Initial D and its easy to see why this manga series was based around Gunma due to the large amount of bordering mountains and the touge it contains.

Broken S14 at Kiryu touge.

The main aspect of the touge which I enjoy is the fact that everyone is out there for one purpose and that’s fun. There are no real attuides or classes just everyone drifting together and having a good time. If by some stroke of bad luck you do crash your car no problem, everyone will come running in to help, offering advice, tools and phone numbers to contact local tow trucks if you cant manage to limp your ride home.

A cats eye managed to wreck a rear suspension arm and wheel, they are serious business. The s14 seen here sitting on a space saver until parts arrived an hour later. After the S14 was fixed she was ready for some 4th gear touge.

Touge is where many people come to learn how to drift, a very dangerous way to start learning which often ends up in bent panels and tears. Akagi is infamous for the huge amount of learner drivers that race up and down the mountains every weekend. Because of the high volume of beginner drifters / grip racers this means far more crashes, more police activity and more cats eyes. This lower speed touge is busy every weekend with out fail but the price you pay is being surrounded by extremely slow and dangerous drivers spinning off course and into your path 70% of the time. On rare occasions you will find some higher level drifters running the mountains, but like I said that’s on rare occasions.

Hoshinos old 180sx pictured below as he leads the car in into the darkness. I have never witnessed larger braking entries on the touge then with this man behind the wheel, he simply laughs and talks like the touge requires no attention, his driving is amazing!

Head about 1 hour in the other direction and you will find yourself in the mountainous area of Kiryu. The main touge around Kiryu is where you come to drive after you have had several track days or you know the limits of your driving skill and your car. This higher speed touge will see speeds of up to 150kph and more and you will find yourself working through the gears from 4th gear all the way down to 2nd gear. Most of the drivers that come here know the course like the back of their hand and will be seen doing 4th and 3rd gear entries with their front and back wheels locked up heading into the main corner, a far cry from the 2nd gear handbrake entries that Akagi mountain offers. Many local D1 drivers can be found here drifting with friends away from the high stress D1 scene.

The touge fast or slow demands a lot of respect, any error of judgment or laziness will cost you a large amount of money. Some higher level drivers I know find the touge of no interest due to the higher risks or the much lower driving speeds then on offer by their local circuits. I suppose once your use to drifting at the top of 4th gear at around 190 clicks the lower speed touge does not really cut the mustard. But many people still come to the touge to socialize and have fun and it will still this way for many years to come, you wont find drifting anywhere else that’s cheaper then a tank of gas and some spare tires.

Akagi claims some Aussie victims, pictured below myself and some of my mates from Australia on a 3 month sponge of your mates drift holiday. A little too fast going down hill ended up with some damage, tried it again and repeated the same damge but on the right hand side haha, the touge is all laughs when your in a cheap junker S14.

Below is the touge video, nothing special just a quick slice and dice with the old equipment i had available to me at the time. This year i will be heading out more with a better video camera in hand to hopefully get some higher quality footage for everyone.

The first half of this video is in-car footage at Akagi with our mate whos a D1 driver also in Team Geki driving his wifes very stock S14 running .7 bar boost with just coilovers, diff and an exhaust. It really needed more power for the up hill, the blue 180sx had close to the double the power over the S14. The rest of the video is around Kiryu area with some Team Geki guys and other randoms.

At around 1:05 of the video you will notice an overtake attempt and a very close guard rail encounter!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 1:06 AM and is filed under Crashes, Drifting, Touge, Videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.