At the “NAPAC Fuji SUPER TEC 24-hour Race” held on June 4-5 (Photo by Hiroto Kato)The “NAPAC Fuji SUPER TEC 24-Hour Race” (hereafter referred to as “S-Tai”) is held seven times a year at circuits around Japan. The race started at 3 p.m. on June 4 and finished 24 hours later at 3 p.m. on June 5. Each team consists of six members, and each member runs for four hours straight. One beautiful racer was scheduled to enter this race. Anna Inozume, 27 years old. She is much more beautiful, intelligent, and has a prettier smile than she looks in pictures. She was supposed to start the race at 9:00 a.m. on the 5th, but she was forced to retire due to engine trouble that occurred before that and was unable to start the race. She has attempted this 24-hour race four years in a row since 2018, but this was the first time she had the disappointment of not being able to run.   As a teenager, Anna was obsessed with piano and volleyball, not interested in cars Anna’s father has been a racer, having won the All-Japan Gymkhana Championship. However, after retiring from racing 20 years ago, he worked as an office worker. Anna has a strong impression of her father as a businessman. She only has a faint memory of a noisy car at home when she was a child. “I was raised under the policy that if a girl was born, she should play the piano, and if a boy was born, he should play the kart. So I continued to play the piano from an early age and won many prizes in competitions. However, I inherited my father’s DNA, who used to be a racer, and I guess I inherited his competitive, active, and dreamy nature, so I loved sports that involved a lot of physical exertion.” She entered the world of volleyball at the age of 10, and spent her junior high and high school years playing in club activities, leading her to the Department of Exercise Science at the Japan Women’s College of Physical Education. She also took a teaching course and vaguely dreamed of becoming a physical education teacher at a school and an advisor to the volleyball team in the future. However, after entering the College of Physical Education, all of the volleyball players in the athletic department were over 180 cm tall, and Anna, who was in the 160 cm range, felt limited in her ability to continue to play volleyball at that point. “I had nothing left to be passionate about, and I had no energy to do anything. I spent all my time working part-time at a cake shop and as a cram school teacher, but I had not found a subject that I could devote myself to. I wondered if I would grow up incompetent.” So, at the age of 19, she decided to get a car license. However, she was not interested in driving a car; a driver’s license would serve as a form of identification. That’s what she thought. “When I was talking about getting a driver’s license, my father, who had kept quiet until then, said, ‘If you want to get a driver’s license, you should get a manual license, not an automatic (AT) only license, and I will pay the difference in the lesson fee’ he said. I thought that if he was willing to pay the difference, it was okay, so I got a manual license.”