INCIDENTS
The moment you catch the car in front is the most dangerous
Laid out and read again, all 75 sessions show the failures repeating the same shape. It is embarrassing, but that is where it is most useful.
The descriptions contain more about what went wrong than about what went well. At the time I wrote them meaning to expose myself. Twenty years on, laid out again, the pattern of failure repeats.
The chain that repeats
- You catch the car in front
- You get excited
- Unintended understeer or oversteer appears in an extreme form
- Right after the car in front makes a mistake, you make one too
- In the end you are dropped
This sequence comes out clearly in several videos, and at the time I wrote things like “the typical state of excitement everyone goes through” and “carrying on like that I would certainly have hit something”.
Warning signs
- Unintended understeer or oversteer in an extreme form
- No margin left on the opposite lock, and the snap back catches you
- A disturbed mind goes straight into the steering
Individual cases
| Place | What happened | What I took from it |
|---|---|---|
| SUGO (rain) | Locked the wheels on a downshift in the wet and had a fright | Kept public deliberately, as a symbol of how frightening the wet is |
| SUGO | Big oversteer immediately after setting a best on a time attack. Contact avoided | The moment after a best is the most dangerous |
| Fuji Speedway (new) | Before the chicane, another car’s line running wide to the outside put me from flat in 4th towards the grass | Dangerous even where there is trust |
| SUGO | A 911 GT3 RS spun. 10cm left to the guardrail | It survives from both viewpoints, the car I was riding in and the car behind |
| Fuji Speedway (old) | Three contacts. A period when I was flat out without worrying about the bodywork bill | My fastest period, and also my most precarious |
| Unknown | 1998, a big crash. Six months after the old Fuji Speedway period | Cautious about drifting from then on. My driving became careful |
| SUGO | Chasing an F360 Challenge, oversteer around the 3-minute mark. The opposite lock was too late and the snap back caught me | Tyre characteristics and a disturbed mind combined |
| Misano | A 1973 Carrera RS spun from a flat out entry | An everyday sight in Europe, where responsibility is your own |
| Misano | A 993 Turbo rolled on the back straight and was written off | The run-off is wide but the grass is uneven |
| Twin Ring Motegi | Locked up from the first lap in the Clio 16V, which has no ABS. Heavy vibration from the flat spots | The danger of a foot used to ABS. I have not taken this car to a circuit since |
| Honjo Circuit | Water and oil temperatures rose in the RX-7 and it could not be driven properly | Led to looking at a V-mount |
| Nürburgring Nordschleife | Sharing the track with motorcycles | The risk of public free running |
| Fuji Speedway | There was a chance to drive a Manthey M700 and I turned it down | A JPY 40 million bodywork risk. Knowing when to stop |
Reflections on equipment
Comments were made about driving in short sleeves, without gloves and without a helmet, so I added an explanation across all the videos. At European track days the three items were not compulsory, and the practice was that where they were not worn it was as a rule a driving school, while for races they were worn. Even so, short sleeves in the Japanese footage cannot be defended. I treat it as bad practice.
Source： Session logs No.5 / 15 / 16 / 17 / 18 / 20 / 21 / 27 / 29 / 32 / 33 / 40 / 41 / 53 / 57 / 69 / 73 / 75
Written in Japanese and translated. The video descriptions themselves are left in the original Japanese.