The first Drift Package went on sale on 6 February 2004, on a racing chassis

On Yokomo's March 2003 page, captured 8 April 2003, the MR-4TC SD SSG Special (model code MRTC-SD1) is listed on sale 25 March 2003 at ¥39,000, and described as ヨコモ初のシャフトドライブ車 — Yokomo's first shaft-drive car.

That sentence does one useful piece of work beyond the date: it tells you what SD means on this chassis. It is shaft drive. It is not "Super Drift", a name Yokomo would later use for a tier of its modern RWD line. The MR-4TC SD arrived as a 1/10 electric racing touring car, nearly a year before anything called a Drift Package appeared on the same pages.

By the January 2004 page, captured 18 January 2004, the Zero One drift tire and a set of wheels listed for drift cars are already on sale. The hard plastic tire — the thing that makes a 1/10 car slide at all — is in the catalogue before the kit that would be built around it.

Then comes the entry everyone has been dating by memory. On the February 2004 page, captured 19 April 2004, DP-180SX is listed at ¥22,890 including tax, on sale 6 February 2004, and called 第一弾 — the first release. It is a Nissan 180SX body kit on the MR-4TC SD CM chassis. The same page lists a 180SX street-version body set on sale 21 February and DP-AE86, the second release, on 27 February. The March 2004 page, captured 24 March 2004, has DP-S15 as the third release, planned for 31 March.

So the Drift Package did not launch as a chassis. It launched as a body kit designation applied to a shaft-drive racing touring car, with drift tires already in the range and a scale shell on top — a 180SX, then an AE86, then an S15, one a month.

Yokomo later dated itself the same way. Its report on the Special Round held 15–16 December 2007 says it is about four years since the 180SX street version went on sale — the event report, as captured in 2012. That agrees with February 2004, from the company's own side of the counter.

Nearly two years on, the framing had not changed. The December 2005 page, captured 9 May 2007, lists an HKS Altezza D1-spec kit that still uses what Yokomo calls its latest racing MR-4TC SD molded-type chassis, paired with a drift tire described as patent pending. The same page lists the Drift Racer as a factory-assembled "Ready To Drift" chassis set — the shift from a kit you build to something closer to an RTR, inside the same family.

Why Yokomo chose the SD chassis rather than one of its belt cars is not stated on any of these pages. Nor is what CM or CGM stand for. The pages name the parts; they do not explain the decision.

The pages read here put the first Drift Package release on 6 February 2004. They do not establish that it was the first drift kit anyone sold. The 2003 pages consulted carry no drift items, but a gap in what was crawled is not evidence that nothing existed, and whether another maker had a drift kit earlier has not been researched here.

The frequently repeated link between the Drift Package and the popularity of D1 comes from Japanese Wikipedia, not from Yokomo's pages, and is worth treating as a received claim until someone finds it in print from the company.

The Drift Package is an AWD car, and the AWD era — 50/50 chassis, then the counter-steer ratios that came with it — is not where the scene lives now. Modern 1/10 drift is RWD: Yokomo's own YD-2 family and what followed it, MST's RMX, Reve D's RDX, Overdose's GALM, every one of them running a gyro between receiver and steering servo. Nobody buys a 2004 kit to go to drift night.

What did carry forward is the recipe on that February 2004 page. A racing touring car chassis, hard plastic tires chosen for the surface rather than rubber, and a polycarbonate scale shell of a car the audience recognizes — a 180SX, an AE86, an S15. Twenty-two years later the chassis under a drift car is still a competition platform, the tires are still hard plastic matched to carpet or P-tile or asphalt, and the shell is still the reason most people walk over to look.

The documents survive too. Yokomo's Drift Package manuals and setup sheets, including gear ratio charts and sheets for Yatabe Arena on asphalt and on carpet, are collected on the Drift Package manuals page; the Drift Racer's manuals and exploded view are on the Drift Racer page. If you want to know what a setting on a 2004-era kit actually said, that is where to read it rather than where to guess it.