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The story
A thread that kicked off with the simple line “There’s that car anime, Cyber Formula, right?” revealed just how much people’s memories of broadcast stations and time slots varied by region — with one poster even testifying that even though it was supposedly a Nippon TV network show, it aired as early as 5:30am where they lived. Fans traded memory after memory: how the TV series got canceled due to poor toy sales but kept a devoted fanbase alive through the OVAs, praise calling the climax of episodes 35–37 “among the best in anime history,” and the observation that thanks to a shared screenwriter, Bakusou Kyoudai Let’s & Go! has a similar kind of appeal.
What people said
Given the era, I feel like if it was anime we'd just tune in regardless of whether it was aimed at girls or boys.
I'm from Aichi and I watched it.
After that it was OVAs.
Maybe Yomiuri TV just didn't carry the network feed?
I have zero memory of it.
You've got stock-car-looking things, silhouette-formula-looking things, proto-racing-car-looking things, formula-car-looking things, concept-car-looking things, and off-road-buggy-looking things all racing together — it's a pretty chaotic field.
There was a character like Schumacher, right.
Not so much "like Schumacher" — there's literally a character named Schumacher.
And yet the OVAs kept going for that long, so there must've been a really devoted fanbase.
Well, people online who were probably around my age were making a huge fuss about it, but I'd never seen it at all, so I was just like "what is that?"
F1 was popular around that time too, so maybe that had something to do with it.
It was so popular that even as a kindergartner I already knew terms like "Senna," "Nakajima," "McLaren," "Ferrari," and "Tyrrell."
Around 2005
Monday late night.
TV Asahi — that's the same as Asahi Broadcasting, right? (they're actually separate but affiliated stations, a common point of confusion)
Who's that? He hasn't shown up yet.
That's a series the Gundam SEED director worked on.
Oh, the old guy who looks like my "waifu"? (joking that the character design style is the same one he's a sucker for)
Is Bandai Channel the only legit place to watch it? My go-to TSUTAYA closed down last month too.
You can watch it on U-NEXT.
Also, the variable-geometry feature has kind of made its way into modern F1 too.
It started singing without even needing a cassette tape!
That's why he keeps getting good treatment for the rest of the series.
You mean Guderian?
Looking back, I knew Wataru and Grandzort, but I only found out Wataru 2 even existed recently.
Just looked it up — apparently in my area, Wataru 2 and Cyber Formula both aired super early, like 5:30am.
Yeah, I think it was something like that?
Hayato basically turns into a "Kira" (a Gundam SEED reference — an overpowered, ability-creep protagonist) and gets too strong, so even though he's the main character he's not that popular.
The way it builds from the end of episode 35 through 36 and 37 is up there with the best moments in anime history.
Well, the cars are Mini 4WD too, so…
I got hooked on Let's & Go! I love how Carlo isn't trying to crush anyone, he just absolutely cannot afford to lose, and Bled, who plays it cool-headed but can't hide that he's actually a hot-blooded entertainer who obsesses over winning in style.
Background and Key Points
Shinseiki GPX Cyber Formula is a 1991 Sunrise production that aired its original TV series on the Nippon TV network during Japan’s early-90s F1 boom, when Ayrton Senna and Japan’s own Satoru Nakajima were household names even among small children. Japanese broadcasting runs on a network-affiliate system rather than a single national feed: NTV’s local affiliate in each prefecture decides whether and when to carry a given show, so a series billed as “network TV” can vanish entirely in some regions or get shunted into a pre-dawn burn-off slot, exactly as posters describe with 5:30am airings in their areas. The toy line (die-cast racing machines) sold poorly, the sponsor withdrew, and the TV run was cut short after one season — an unusually blunt example of merchandising failure killing a series outright. What kept the franchise alive was a string of OVAs stretching across the rest of the decade, sustained by an older, non-toy-buying fanbase rather than the kids the show was originally aimed at.
The thread’s actual disagreement isn’t about quality but about which station and timeslot people watched it on: some insist it was NTV in 1991, others recall a TV Asahi broadcast around 2005 (likely a later rerun or the newer OVA entries), and there’s separate confusion over TV Asahi versus the affiliated-but-distinct Asahi Broadcasting Corporation in Kansai.
What outsiders are likely to miss is that this scattershot memory isn’t nostalgia playing tricks — it’s a direct artifact of Japan’s fragmented regional broadcast system, where the “same” anime could be a primetime hit in Tokyo and an obscure early-morning rerun two prefectures over.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “There’s that car anime, Cyber Formula, right?.”
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