SAMMIT's Sam Lucas: He Keeps “Leaving Japan,” and He Keeps Coming Back
This article is also available in Japanese: Read the Japanese version
From inside Japan, one man is telling the world about cars and drifting, in English. His name is Sam Lucas, and his YouTube channel is SAMMIT.
Scan his video titles and you may do a double take: “WHY I LEFT JAPAN!” and lines like it turn up again and again. Look inside those videos, though, and the story turns out to be quite different.
For this article we went through his video descriptions and captions, Formula Drift Japan's official site, and press interviews and articles. The numbers here are as of October 31, 2026, measured by this site through the YouTube API. We did not watch the videos themselves; we checked what is in them through their captions and descriptions. Quotes from videos come from their English captions and descriptions.
Who Is SAMMIT? Where He's From and How Old He Is
As of October 31, 2026, the channel had 813,000 subscribers, about 199.2 million total views, and 1,999 videos. The channel description puts it this way: “SAMMIT is a YouTube channel that showcases my life living in Japan. I love Japanese Culture, Cars, & Drifting!”
The driver list on Formula Drift Japan's official site gives his name as Sam Lucas, and the same list sets an Australian flag beside it. He says so himself: “me being Australian” in a 2016 video, and “I'm more of a Queenslander” in a 2023 one. We could not confirm the city where he was born, though.
The earliest descriptions on the channel carry a filming and editing credit under the name Samuel Lucas. It seems fair to take that as a name he goes by.
As for his age, a May 2023 EarlyGame article gave it as 33. His own words do not back that up, however, and we found no birth date, which may be a bit of a letdown.
As for marriage, 52 of his videos have “wife” in the title. The oldest is from June 2018. His Japanese wife appears often in the videos, and in May 2026 he put out one in which he gives her the car of her dreams.
From Behind the Scenes in Broadcasting to the Drifting World
Sam Lucas's arrival in Japan reads as mid-2015: in a July 2016 video, he says that week is his “one year anniversary living here permanently in Japan.” BE FORWARD's announcement (in Japanese) of its sponsorship deal also gives 2015 as the year he moved.
Why he moved is another matter. The sources tell it differently. That announcement says he came to learn Japanese-style drifting. And at the start of a 2022 video of his own, the captions read, “I wanted to learn from some of the best people here in the country how to drift essentially.” But a 2023 Metropolis article says he “originally put his passion for cars on the back burner as he instead pursued an opportunity to work in broadcasting in Japan.”
We can't say here which is right. As far as his career goes, the broadcasting side comes up in his own videos too. In a 2024 video he described his earlier job as “live engineering for Japan's biggest sports broadcaster” and said he worked on a system for watching F1 by switching between views. The broadcaster's name did not appear in the captions we checked.
His way back into cars seems to have come through a meeting a couple of years into his life in Japan. Speaking to Metropolis, he credited Okachan, the owner of Yashio Factory: “Meeting him rekindled my passion for cars.” “He mentored me into becoming a professional driver,” he added. It must have been a meeting that mattered.
In 2017 he also put out a video of himself taking Okachan to a drifting event in Australia.
The oldest video still public on the channel is a snowboarding trip to Hakuba, dated February 5, 2016. It went up just six minutes after the channel was opened, one of seven videos that day, including numbered ones such as “VLOGS EP 7.” He may have been re-uploading videos he had made earlier.
His upload count jumped from 116 videos in 2018 to 315 in 2019. That same year his titles celebrated 50,000 subscribers in June and 100,000 in November.
In 2023, Metropolis quoted him: “It has been four years since I began pursuing YouTube fulltime.” He also said, “I have my own car shop now, with three staff members employed to support me.” The official store at sammit.net was selling car parts as well as clothes.
The 13 “Leaving Japan” Videos, and Where They Really Went
Count the videos with phrases like “LEFT JAPAN” or “GOODBYE JAPAN” in the title and, as of October 31, 2026, you get 13. That's quite a few.
The description of a December 2021 video goes as far as saying, “I left Japan & don't know if I'll be going back.” Open the captions, though, and it's a trip to surprise a friend in the U.S.
The March 2022 video “WHY I DECIDED TO LEAVE AGAIN!” goes one better: the destination is Okinawa. Read the description closely and it says, “I leave the main island of Japan & don't know when I'll be coming back!” Which, to be fair, isn't a lie.
The September 2023 video “WHY I REALLY LEFT JAPAN!” turns out to be a trip to Australia, after he was invited to an event in Sydney. The others take him to places like the SEMA show in Las Vegas and a car event in Malaysia. As far as the captions and descriptions show, every one of them was travel abroad: a trip, an away event, a business trip, or a family matter.
This hasn't gone unnoticed. A January 2025 Drifted article says “his approach to content mostly remains genuine (with some blatant clickbait thrown into the mix), focusing on the real experiences of building and drifting cars in Japan.”
As it happens, there was a time when he really couldn't get back. According to a 2020 video, he was “stuck in the USA for 4 months unable to return to Japan because of the Coronavirus pandemic.” The description of his homecoming video reads, “I'm finally home!”
This is a man who said of a business trip to Australia, back in 2016, “honestly I was homesick in Australia for Japan.” By now, home for him is probably Japan.
His Most-Viewed Video Is a 60-Second “Mafia Car” Clip
We went through all of his videos and ranked them by views. The top one is a short video from November 2023, at 11.59 million views. That a 60-second clip sits on top of 1,999 videos is a bit of a surprise. In those 60 seconds, the trunk of a used luxury sedan won't open, and some digging turns up a hidden switch.
He told the car's backstory in April 2023, in the video about buying it. He bought it at auction and put out a video, and the seller then asked him to take it down. He says he pulled that first video for the time being, after about 70,000 people had watched it.
By his account, the car was originally supposed to have been scrapped. From that, he figured it may have been a Yakuza car. That is his guess, though, not something based on checking who actually owned it.
Below that come longer videos: an August 2020 barn find of legendary cars at 4.65 million views, and a January 2021 video on Japanese car auctions at 4.45 million. He may simply have a knack for showing Japan's used-car world from the buyer's side, a world that looks unusual to viewers outside the country.
A September 2026 video on what famous Japanese cars cost had also climbed to 1.03 million views as of October 31.
The Ebisu Earthquake, and Moments on Stream
One moment that is hard to forget is the earthquake of February 13, 2021. He was in a hotel lobby near Ebisu Circuit in Fukushima, and he filmed while taking cover under a table. It must have been terrifying.
The next morning he checked the damage at the circuit, and he used the video to call for support. According to Metropolis, an effort with other car creators and track owners brought in over $100,000 from a global audience.
His Twitch streams have made news too. According to a May 2023 Dexerto article (in French), he spotted a burning car during a Drift Matsuri stream and put out the fire with an extinguisher. That same month, EarlyGame covered a scene on a Tokyo street where he stepped in between a woman and a man who was following her.
His broadcasting skills still come in handy. Metropolis wrote about “his own multicamera system, which allows Twitch chat to control switching” between the cameras in his car. What he made in his old job stayed with the company, as he put it in a 2024 video: “When you work for a company, anything that you create is their intellectual property.” So now, it seems, he is putting that know-how to work for himself.
In a September 2024 stream, on the other hand, he admitted that “for the last couple months I have been probably feeling the most burnt out that I have ever felt.” There was no single cause, he explained: “It's just a nonstop I guess barrage of things.”
“I'm Not a Failure”: Taking On Formula Drift Japan
Turning to competition, Sam Lucas announced in a May 2022 video that he would compete in J2, the class below Formula Drift Japan. The description calls it “a dream come true,” and the one for his first time on track says, “I dreamed of doing this for the last 10 years!”
It didn't go smoothly, though. In a video posted that August, he explains, “Last round I couldn't qualify & finished with no points but in this round, I make it all the way to 4th place!” The official site's driver lists have him in J2 for 2022 and 2023, then in the top class, FDJ, from 2024.
An August 2024 video put his first time qualifying in that top class right in the title.
In that video's captions, he says “the one thing that just kept popping up in my head this entire time was that I was a failure.” Then, holding his emotions in check, he sums up: “I'm not a failure at the end of the day.” You don't often see a grown car enthusiast go that far in front of a camera.
BE FORWARD's announcement says the company began sponsoring the team in April 2024 and renewed the deal through March 2026. Links to the company also appear in his video descriptions from June and July 2026, but we could not confirm whether the racing team's contract continues.
In 2025 there were rounds where he failed to qualify, and in September he hit a wall head-on at Okuibuki. According to Drifted's article, the cause was the right front lower control arm, which snapped on entry.
In an April 2026 video, he said his title sponsor had dropped out suddenly. He gave no name, and we could not confirm which company it was. Coming to the rescue was his friend Linus. In the video sponsored by LTT Store, the Linus Tech Tips store, he says, “It helped us out like seriously in a tight spot.” Support coming from outside the car world seems like a pretty rare thing.
In his own words, 2026 “has been the best season that I've ever had.” He got through qualifying at the opening round at Fuji, and a video out in September reports, “I qualified 12th.” In that video he says he is not someone who “jumped in a car and got podium right away” but “50th try Sam.” It's a very Sam way to put it.
He did not make it into battles at the final round at Okayama, and he said he was not satisfied with the judging: “I don't know why the judges were so inconsistent this round.”
Summer 2026: D1, and What He Calls His Biggest Crash
In summer 2026, Sam Lucas also stepped outside Formula Drift. According to a July video, the aim was “to compete in D1 NEXT and begin my journey toward earning a D1GP license.”
The video titled “Competing in D1 For The First Time!” reports the outcome: “I managed to qualify 6th and finish in the Top 16.” The captions also talk about how a high finish would bring him closer to a Lights license. We could not confirm whether he got it.
In August, at Summer Drift Matsuri at Ebisu Circuit, he had what he calls his biggest crash. He “walked away with just a sore neck,” but the description says the R32 Skyline's chassis is “completely written off and beyond saving.”
In September he headed to Malaysia for his first D1GP event. But the car prepared for him “caught fire, and then the engine blew.” He was given another car, and that engine failed too. By the end of the trip, “we had gone through 3 engines, and I never even got the chance to compete.” It must have been a bitter trip for him.
A run like that would worry anyone, but as of October 31 he had put out 165 videos in 2026, including a new one at 2:00 a.m. Japan time that same day.
In September he also released a video about parting with the bare shell of the pink Chaser he had driven for five years. It seems he has swapped shells and kept on driving a Chaser.
For someone else bringing Japanese car culture to the world in English, see our noriyaro article. The January 2025 Drifted article names the two together.
On the Japanese drifting side, it could be fun to read this alongside our FDJ3 article (in Japanese) about Muneo of the Japanese YouTube channel Tsuriyoka Deshou (釣りよかでしょう。), who competed in FDJ3.
