He smokes cigarettes all the time. The year after initial D was first released, in 1996, option magazine hosted one of the earliest recognized drift competitions outside of Japan at willow springs raceway in California. It saw legends like tsuchiya San. NHRA drag racing veteran Kenji Okazaki, an option founder de giro inada, passing judgment over drivers like drift and rally champion, Rhys millen. Since then, competitions of sprung up on nearly every continent. And in the year 2000, tsuchiya San, again, brought the amateur world into the professional realm. The D one Grand Prix, otherwise known as professional drift, was launched in 2000 after tsuchiya San and Nigeria and founder of option and the Tokyo auto salon spent years hosting amateur and professional drift events like those mentioned above. And of course, we can't finish this episode without mentioning our own drift series in the U.S., formula drift. One of the key foundation blocks of this channel in the early days we worked with so many formula drift drivers. We've been to a ton of events. I love going to FD irwindale and Long Beach. If you can make it to Long Beach, treat yourself. Let's try and go to English town this year. That'd be sick too. Yeah, that looks like around there. And yeah, that's like English town is some might say the motherland of U.S. drifting. A lot of the guys that participate in FD right now and historically are from that area and that's the track that it all happened. So get out to an FD event support donut driver, Adam Knapp driving in prospect with the donut media car. Yeah. What started out in Japan has spread all over the world into a truly global professional motor sport bringing drifting full circle, and perhaps that's the most interesting thing about the story of drifting. Despite what most people believe drifting didn't start on the street and then graduate to motor sport. It started as a move on the track, bled out into the street racing scene, and then became so popular that it created its own motor sport. As for tsuchiya San he started out as an illegal street racer and ended up with a class win at Le Mans. I mean, that's the dream. That's the dream, as the dream. Dude, that's some silver octopus shit. That's like how Dane cook started doing a legal comedy on the street. And then he was selling out arenas. Yeah. Dude, he played Madison Square Garden. You did. And then nothing bad happened. He's still popular. All right, we got some fan mail this week. This is from Scott down in Melbourne. Dude, that's your dad's name. This is my dad's name. Melbourne. It's chilling. Our rock with Scott's all around the world, dude. Your name's Scott hell yeah, hell yeah, dude. All right, Scott says, hey guys, in you said in a recent episode, this is not a metal podcast, but it can be. There are so many car related songs in heavy metal. There's big truck by col chamber. Have you guys heard that one? Big truck. It literally just says big truck. It's a fun song. Fueled by Metallica of course. I know that one. Classic. Under my wheels by Alice Cooper. Dracula, by rob. Yes. Anyway, and we can't go past pantera being aimed after dime bag's car, the de tomaso pantera. Keep up the good work and please know bad Ozzy accents. We can't promise that. We can't nope. I won't budge on that. Those are staying. Scott from memory. All right, thank you for your email Scott. And if you like to get in touch with the show, hit us up at pass gas at donut media dot com. We'd love to hear from you. Thank you so much for listening to the show. Follow James at James pumphrey, follow Joe at Joji Weber, follow me at Nolan J Sykes. Big thank you to our producers this week again, Christina felski and Gavin kinzel, and our writer, Mike Perkins. Mike Perkins. This episode comes out on January 9th at 3 p.m.. I will be doing an AMA on wink Chan. I hope you guys join Joe's going to be there too. I'm a moderator.