Hideki Noda (野田 英樹, Noda Hideki, born 7 March 1969) is a professional racing driver from Japan. He participated in three Formula One Grands Prix, debuting in the 1994 European Grand Prix, but did not score any championship points. He replaced Yannick Dalmas in the Larrousse car for the last three Grands Prix of the season, but failed to finish in any of the three races. In 1995, he joined Simtek as a test driver, hoping to get some races in. However, the Kobe earthquake and the folding of the Simtek team ended his brief career.

A year later, Noda went to America and raced in the Indy Lights and became the only Japanese driver to win a CART-sanctioned event. After a few years in America, Noda moved back to Japan, where he drove a Team Cerumo Toyota Supra with Hironori Takeuchi. In the annual non-championship All-Star event at Aida, Noda and Takeuchi were forced out with mechanical problems. In 1999, he joined the Esso Tiger Team Le Mans under Koichiro Mori, again to drive a Toyota Supra, ex-Australian V8 Supercar driver Wayne Gardner. The highlight of their season was a win at Fuji. With 33 points they were equal 17th in the series.

Hideki Noda (野田 秀樹, Noda Hideki, born on 20 December 1955) is an acclaimed Japanese actor, playwright and theatre director who has written and directed more than 40 plays in Japan, and is working to bring modern Japanese theatre to an international audience.

Biography

Noda was born in Nagasaki, Japan. He briefly attended Tokyo University to study law but eventually dropped out. Noda debuted his first play, An Encounter Between Love and Death during his second year of high school. His second play, The Advent of the Beast, was well received by critics in 1981. This led to his invitation to perform at the Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland, which he already participated in three years earlier. In 2008 he was also appointed artistic director of Tokyo Metropolitan Art Space in Ikebukuro, and became a professor in the Department of Scenography Design, Drama,and Dance at Tama Art University.

When he was four years old, his family moved from Kyushu to Tokyo. When he reached the age of 16, Noda wrote and staged his very first play. With his high-school friends, he decided to title it, Ai to Shi o Mitsumete (Gaze into Love and Death). Later on in 1976, Noda founded his theatre company named Yume no Yuminsha (Dreaming Bohemian), while he was still in Tokyo University as a law student. Yume no Yuminsha became the emblem of the country’s vibrant youth theatre firmament and the leader of a nationwide cultural movement in the early 1980s known as Sho-gekijo (Small-scale Theatre Movement).