Takumi stops being a kid who got lucky and becomes a driver who understands what he's doing. The racing sequences finally move fast enough to match the actual speed of the cars. Every match against a new team follows the same shape, but the show knows you're here for the moment when Takumi figures out the line nobody else saw, and it delivers that moment clean.

Takumi Fujiwara teams up with the brothers Keisuke and Ryousuke Takahashi to form Project D, a street racing squad built to test its drivers against strong opponents beyond their home prefecture of Gunma. Ryousuke runs the team and wants to refine his theory of high-speed street racing. Takumi handles downhill battles in his AE86, and Keisuke takes on rivals uphill. Through a website Ryousuke sets up, Project D announces its upcoming challenges to teams from other prefectures and posts its results, aiming to set uphill and downhill records on dangerous roads. Rivals include the Seven-Star Leaf and Todo-juku. Meanwhile, on Mount Akina, Takumi is caught by surprise when he runs into his father Bunta driving a newly acquired Subaru Impreza WRX Type R Version V.