KARASU
The KARASU was the real beginning of DOME's history.
In 1965, when I, a young Minoru Hayashi, was going through a
serious "hunger" for making cars, Hiroshi Fushida, who was a
classmate and later a Toyota works driver, called to tell me
that Tojiro Ukiya, who was a mutual friend of ours and later
a legendary Japanese racing driver, wanted me to remodel his
HONDA S600 into a GT car.
I immediately saw Tojiro to make arrangements, and found that
we had only 60,000 yen to spend (about US$170 at the then exchange
rate), being about 200,000 to 300,000 yen today. Everybody was
poor then, anyway. Since there was not much time left before
the target race, we decided to focus on weight reduction and
to aerodynamically improve the car's shape (mainly drag reduction,
for there was no concept of "downforce" in those days), and
fabricate a hardtop with a nose cone and fastback styling. I,
then at 19 years of age, started fabrication from nothing; no
money, experience, factory, staff, or time. After much difficulty
I 'borrowed' a garage from a friend to use as a workshop, but
was soon kicked out due to the overpowering odor of FRP. I had
no choice but to try to work on the bed of a borrowed truck.
Finally, having nowhere else to go, I decided to work in my
room, where I sanded down FRP using a sander, causing the resulting
white powder to cover the paintings of my father, who was an
artist. This led to us quarreling. Under such circumstances
and through such a process, which was anything but "racing car
development," the car finally took shape the day before the
race.
Halfway through the fabrication process, the S600 was taken
to a different place for underbody improvement, meaning that
the car was not available to me at the critical stage of alignment.
Therefore I felt it would be almost impossible to mount the
FRP parts I had fabricated onto the car, especially when I found
there were misalignments of 2 to 3 cm. However, Tojiro managed
to mount them by drilling into the body of his new S600 and
we barely made it to the race, as is well known among Japanese
racing circles.
Mounted on the white body, the messy FRP parts were eye-catching
certainly, but in a negative sense. Noting this, Hirotoshi Honda,
who became a friend of mine around that time and is currently
President of Mugen Co., Ltd., said, "It'll be cool if it were
anti-glare coated like a fighter plane!" and bought a can of
flat black paint. We painted the whole car using brushes, somewhat
hiding the roughness of the finish.
Owing to its coal-black appearance and its sharp nose, over
the course of time the car came to be known as "KARASU", meaning
crow. On its debut, the KARASU won its first race at the Suzuka
Clubman Race. |
