Over a million Australians visited Japan last year – up 15% on the year before – and most of them saw exactly what you would expect them to see. The Shibuya crossing, the izakayas, a glow of countless billboards and convenience stores that could be documented by the Hubble Telescope. All of it is certainly worth experiencing, though none of it is particularly hard to find.
What’s harder to find – unless you know someone, or know someone who knows someone – is the circuit culture. The tracks just outside of town where professional drift drivers have spent careers perfecting something that looks, from the outside, like chaos, and feels, from the passenger seat, like nothing else on earth.
Uber has found a way to get you there.
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What It Is
Uber Drift is the latest entry in the platform’s Go Anywhere series. Following Uber Safari in South Africa, Uber Copter in Italy, and Uber Balloon in Turkey, it marks the series’ first move into Asia-Pacific.
The experience is a half-day affair that starts and ends with an Uber Black from anywhere in the city. In between, you’re driven to Mobara Twin Circuit – a legendary track about 90 minutes outside of Tokyo – where a pair of Formula Drift licensed professional drivers and two of the most iconic JDMs ever built are waiting: a Nissan Silvia S15 and a Nissan 180SX.
The S15 was the final iteration of Nissan’s legendary Silvia line – a car so perfectly suited to drifting it became the weapon of choice for a generation of drivers. The 180SX, its fastback sibling, has spent three decades earning the same reputation. These are the real deal.
You get in the passenger seat. The driver gets to work.
You’ll find the car in angles that feel rightfully concerning. The sound will be unlike anything you heard in Tokyo Drift, and the driver’s hands will move with a quiet efficiency akin to that of a maestro.
You will not share his composure.
What You Get
¥30,000 (~AU$265) flat for up to four people. That covers private round-trip transfers in an Uber Black, 90 minutes of actual track time in the passenger seat of a professional drift car, and snacks for the road.
Capacity is capped at four groups per day, and each reservation is entirely private, meaning it’s just you and your mates.
Bookings open May 27, with experience dates running June 3 through July 1. That’s four weeks, four groups a day, and a lot of people who saw Tokyo Drift at an impressionable age. Do the maths.
