Initial D 1st Stage

Takumi Fujiwara is an ordinary high school student in Gunma Prefecture who spends his days pumping gas at a local station and his early mornings making tofu deliveries for his father's shop. What he does not think much about is the car he drives on those deliveries, an aging Toyota Sprinter AE86 Trueno that his father tuned by hand, or the precise downhill technique he has quietly built up on the winding roads of Mt. Akina. To Takumi, the mountain pass is simply the route he takes before dawn, and driving is just another chore.

The people around him see something different. His father, Bunta, runs the tofu shop and knows exactly what the nightly runs have turned his son into. At the gas station, Takumi's friend Itsuki dreams of owning a car and joining the local racing scene, while coworkers Iketani and Kenji lead the Akina Speed Stars, a small amateur team that races on the mountain. When faster groups from elsewhere in Gunma begin challenging the Speed Stars on their home course, the crew finds itself outmatched and turns to an unlikely driver to answer for Mt. Akina.

The conflict is built around that mismatch between Takumi's low-key life and the reputation forming around him. Rival teams, including the formidable RedSuns with brothers Ryosuke and Keisuke Takahashi, keep arriving to test whether the AE86 and its unknown driver are as good as the rumors suggest. Takumi has no ambition to become a legend, yet each challenge pulls him further into the world of late-night street racing, where his natural feel for the road is measured against drivers who have trained for years.

Initial D 1st Stage adapts the early portion of Shuichi Shigeno's street racing manga, which was serialized in Kodansha's seinen magazine Weekly Young Magazine beginning in 1995. The manga's emphasis on drifting and on illegal racing through mountain passes carried over into the anime, and professional drifter Keiichi Tsuchiya contributed editorial supervision to the source material.

This television adaptation ran for 26 episodes in Japan during 1998, opening in the spring season and finishing in December, with each episode running about 25 minutes. The story follows high school student Takumi Fujiwara and the Gunma prefecture racing scene, centering on mountain roads rather than city streets as the setting for its competitions.

The series subsequently reached English-speaking viewers through a dubbed version, and it has been available on streaming services including Hulu, Crunchyroll, YouTube, and Bandai Channel.