Initial-D Fourth Stage

This series focuses on the exploits of the new team founded by Ryosuke, Project D, which is comprised of Ryosuke (leader and strategist), Takumi Fujiwara (downhill specialist), Keisuke (uphill specialist) and a staff consisting primarily of members of the Akagi Red Suns. The team travels the region, challenging other teams and posting the results of the battles on their website. Each race is intended by Ryosuke to develop a specific area of his drivers' skills.

Takumi matures slowly into a more confident and knowledgeable street racer, while Keisuke improves on his technical driving skills. Takumi instinctively develops many new techniques through his own ingenuity after some prompting by Ryosuke, such as passing with his headlights off so that his opponent is unable to see him coming and block him, and using weight shifting to execute maneuvers similar to the gutter-hook technique on Akina.

Project D's opponents get progressively tougher. Their first adversaries are members of local racing teams, but then they progress to facing students at Todojyuku, a professional racing school, and then Tomoyuki Tachi, an actual professional racer, first when the school enlists one of their graduates to avenge their defeat and then when a street racing team they had previously faced calls upon a rally driver to race Takumi in an ultra-lightweight car.

As Project D's quest to conquer the area's street racing scene goes on, new relationships and old enemies complicate things for the team's members. Keisuke struggles with his attraction to Kyoko, a female street racer and fellow FD driver who he met by chance shortly before they ended up facing each other in a battle, as he fears having a girlfriend would take away too much time from his driving and cause him to lose his focus. Later on in the series, Keisuke breaks Kyoko's heart when he confides to her that their relationship will not work. Meanwhile, Takumi's old rival and fellow 86 driver Wataru watches Project D's exploits with interest, looking for a way to bring about their defeat.

The team encounters yet another different kind of challenge as a new set of opponents turn to deceit and intimidation rather than skill for victory. They damage Keisuke's FD, and he borrows Kyoko's to defeat them.

Eventually Project D face off with the senior members of the Purple Shadow Team. Kozo Hoshino, known as "God Foot", is a driver known for his magnificent footwork (able to make his Skyline, a moderately weighed and wide car, accelerate without lag naturally instead of through the use of a misfiring system and possessed of an uncanny ability to maintain his concentration. He screams loudly while driving to release tension and prevent himself from making an error due to overconcentration. With his amazing combination of skills, he's able to make his 4WD GT-R drift, a feat considered impossible due to the fact that a stock BNR34 has an anti-slip system, ATTESA E-TS Pro, correcting the car's line if it were to begin to lose control. The GT-R he drives is a BNR34 Nissan Skyline GT-R V-spec II Nür, a run-out special featuring the handbuilt engine from the N1 homologation version. Joshima Toshiya, Kozo's counterpart who known as "God Hand", is a driver known for driving skillfully with one hand using a Honda S2000, reminiscent of the "Ductape deathmatch" forced upon Takumi when he raced Shingo in First Stage. With his one-handed technique, he can limit countersteer and perform an ideal drift, conserving his tires while still gaining speed on corners. The overall theory for the one handed driving is that in doing so one is able to choose easily between the infinite driving lines possible in a race. Joshima spent all of his recent years trying to find out the limits of the technique, and in his studies after the race he teaches Takumi the theory of one handed driving. Though he doubted that Takumi would start driving with one hand, he did believe he would master using the infinite lines to his advantage in future races.