The former director of the N.I.T. Motor Club appears and challenges Keiichi to a pocketbike race.
Summary
Tamiya and Otaki are hiding inside their three-wheeled pickup truck, worried about a certain "her" coming back all of a sudden.
A woman knocks on the front door of the Motor Club's old clubhouse, and after receiving no answer, she finds the poster saying that the club relocated to another location. She finds the new location and angrily storms inside looking for Tamiya and Otaki, as they had moved the club without her permission. Only, they aren't present and she realizes that they've already graduated. She instead finds Keiichi, Belldandy, Sora Hasegawa, and the other club members working on a pocketbike frame, which she immediately begins fawning over.
While this woman assumes it's an RC motorcycle, Keiichi explains that they are ostensibly looking into creating the smallest possible internal combustion engine, which is what they told the school's grant committee, but they're really just interested in seeing if someone could ride it. The woman finds his reasoning hilarious, but she says she isn't making fun of him but instead remembers how someone she knew was once like him, and she likes the fire in his eyes.
She decides she will also make a pocketbike as a "test" and asks Keiichi if he will race her when she's finished. Keiichi is hesitant to accept, but Belldandy reminds him of how they do things for fun. The woman tells them they will race two days from now, and when Keiichi finally asks exactly who she is, she introduces herself as Chihiro Fujimi, the former Motor Club director!
Sora reads through a book about the club's history and learns that it was Chihiro who took over Nekomi Tech's feeble Automobile Fan Club and revamped it into the Motor Club as it's known today. Additionally, since she graduated, she has been on the racing team for a leading motorcycle manufacturer. Another Motor Club member asks Keiichi if he stands a chance against a pro like Chihiro, but Keiichi says he only wants to race her even more now that she knows who she is and thinks she's testing him to see if he's qualified to lead the club.
Outside, Chihiro knows that Tamiya and Otaki are hiding in the bushes and makes them come out. She tells them that they found some very competent people for the club and thanks them for their work, but she'll have to punish them later for moving the club without her permission.
Two days later, Keiichi and Chihiro line their pocketbikes up at Nekomi Tech, where Belldandy tells them the winner will be whoever completes two laps around the campus first. The race begins, and Chihiro takes an early lead with Keiichi wondering how she tuned her bike. He comes narrowly close to hitting a wall and Belldandy continues cheering him on at various points on the track (with Chihiro confused as to how she can appear in so many places).
On the second lap, Keiichi hopes that Chihiro's bike will eventually break down because of how she turned her engine to the max, but it turns out she had a spare engine that she switched to. Chihiro gets distracted looking back at Keiichi when she suddenly comes upon the final turn and lets Keiichi overtake her. However, Keiichi realizes he braked for too long, and Chihiro overtakes him on the final stretch to win the race.
When they finish racing, Chihiro thanks Keiichi for giving her good things to remember, and she recollects her time at the motor club and the three words that kept her there: "because it's fun". Keiichi asks Chihiro about the "test" she mentioned earlier, assuming it was for him, but she says that she was testing herself, and now that she's won the race, she tells him that she's decided to quit her racing team and work on making motorcycles that she wants to make because it will be fun for her, and Keiichi feels the same way as Chihiro.
Their attention then turns to Tamiya and Otaki, who they find greedily scarfing down the cake that one of the club members made in case Keiichi won the race.
Trivia
- In this chapter, Chihiro rides a Krauser Domani, a three-wheeled motorcycle-type vehicle that has an integrated sidecar. In Japan, the Domani can be legally driven with a normal driver's license instead of a motorcycle license.