The Initial D anime franchise had been dormant as a television series for six years before Fifth Stage arrived. Initial D Fourth Stage, the previous installment, had concluded in February 2006. Fifth Stage marked a return to the television format after this extended hiatus and introduced SynergySP as the animation studio.
The series continued the narrative established through the preceding stages: Takumi Fujiwara racing as part of Project D, the expeditionary team founded by Ryosuke and Keisuke Takahashi to challenge the fastest drivers throughout Japan. By this point in the story, Project D had already defeated rivals from multiple prefectures and was moving toward its climactic final battles.
Fifth Stage was animated by SynergySP and ran for 14 episodes. It was previewed on Animax on November 4, 2012, and subsequently broadcast on SKY PerfecTV!'s Perfect Choice Premier 1 channel from November 9, 2012, to May 10, 2013.
The series aired on pay-per-view satellite television rather than free-to-air broadcast, following the approach established by Fourth Stage, which had also aired on SKY PerfecTV!. This marked a shift from the first two stages, which had broadcast on Fuji TV.
Fifth Stage continued the Project D campaign that had begun in Fourth Stage. The manga arc covered in Fifth Stage brought Project D's journey closer to its resolution, with Takumi facing opponents who tested the AE86's limits. A central development in the later manga arcs involves Takumi being defeated by his own father, Bunta, driving a Subaru Impreza WRX STI, forcing Takumi to adapt his driving technique to account for four-wheel-drive dynamics.
Project D's campaign eventually culminates in a final race against Shinji Inui of Team Sidewinder. The outcome — Takumi blowing his engine mid-race but coasting backward across the finish line to secure victory — represents the AE86's last competitive race in the story.
A compilation release, Initial D Battle Stage 3, covering material from both Fifth Stage and Final Stage, was released on March 5, 2021. Unlike the previous Battle Stage compilations, which featured reanimated or new scenes, Battle Stage 3 did not include any new scenes or original character dialogue.
Fifth Stage was followed immediately by Initial D Final Stage (2014), also animated by SynergySP, which concluded the franchise. The two stages together wrapped up the manga's final narrative arc, which had concluded in Kodansha's Weekly Young Magazine on July 29, 2013, after 18 years of serialization.
The overall Initial D manga had over 55 million copies in circulation by April 2021, making it one of the best-selling manga series in history. The franchise subsequently continued in spirit through Shigeno's MF Ghost manga (2017–2025), which follows Takumi's son in a near-future motorsport setting, and the series Subaru and Subaru launched in 2025.