Battle Magazine — March 1997

The individual event was a series of intense battles, and the spectators were cheering too. The higher the drivers advanced, the more their runs became exchanges of increasingly sophisticated techniques. The qualifiers bet everything on a single run, using a wide range of skills. The winner and holder of Kanagawa M1 honors was Phoenix’s Yoshihiro Uyama in a JZX81 Mark II. His stable, high-speed drifting had the crowd roaring. Phoenix’s Mizuguchi took second in an AE86. “I made mistakes here and there, but I think they gave me some leeway because it was an AE86,” he said, calmly assessing his run. The top drivers certainly know how to keep their perspective!