APEX Mazda RX-7 - State Of The Art

Remember oni-kyan? Probably not by that name. Oni-kyan, which roughly translates to demon camber, was the label for the ludicrous, bow-legged camber seen on virtually every early drift car. It was the setup that gave Japan's backroad hooligans the best control over their crusty junkyard tires and allowed them to pull off daring feats of car control in battered boneyard escapees. Look around the paddock at this year's inaugural U.S. D1 GP and you won't see much oni-kyan. As drifting moved from the streets to the track, TV, video and magazines took notice. That brought sponsors, and money, and race drivers. Those drivers, and the teams building their cars, brought professional race setup experience, and the look of drift machines changed forever.

This, now, is the state of the drifting art. On the surface it could be GT racer, but the setup is distinctly sideways. This particular car was built in a matter of weeks by Jensen Oda, Len Higa, and "Yaks" Yakushiji, the small crew that makes up A'PEXi USA's U.S. R&D team. Built to the strict requirements of A'PEXi driver Youichi Imamura, it's a near-perfect mirror image of the car he drives in Japan. Besides the location of the steering wheel, the A'PEXi-USA car differs from the A'PEXi-Japan car in only one other way: About 200 hp. The Japanese car needs more than 500 hp for some of the higher-speed courses run there. Our smaller course requires only about 380 hp. Or 348 hp at the wheels, to be exact. That's enough that it could run a 12.4 at 117 mph, if Imamura could keep it straight for a full quarter of a mile. Given his record, odds are we'll remain the only ones to ever run a quarter mile with this car.

Coming into the U.S. round, Imamura leads the D1 championship points by a nearly insurmountable 88 to 52. Still, for this race, he's something of an underdog. Competing in a left-hand-drive car built by A'PEXi-USA's small, three-man crew, he is to face his longtime rival Taniguchi, with whom he's been competing since their early days in the hills. Taniguchi is driving for HKS in a car shipped from Japan and supported by the full HKS GT-team that built the car. He's under strict orders to break Imamura's winning streak. For the drivers, it's friendly competition. For the companies, it most definitely is not.