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| May.31.1999 "F1GP-NIPPON CHALLENGE" STATUS REPORT | ||
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No.4 Ah, yes! There is one thing that I have to apologise about, my irrelevance. Some time ago, when I was commenting on the incident in which NISSAN handed their whole Le Mans participation project over to TWR Ltd. in the UK, that I wrote in an article that, 'It is just a gimmick. They want to give the general public the impression that they were competing in a world famous motor car race with their own technology' and, ' we don't need this sort of car manufacturer any more'. However, TOYOTA's participation in Le Mans and HONDA's participation plan for F1 which all rely on existing technology from foreign countries shows that these three major car manufacturers' attitude is common Japanese practice. Furthermore, most of the Japanese journalists and motor racing fans happily accept the fact that these car makers appear in races and test drives with their own marks on a foreign chassis, and I do not hear any strong opposition towards it. So our minor opinion of regarding this as a gimmick would be peculiar if it is judged in a democratic way. Therefore, I have to admit that our concept of 'F1 GP Challenge of NIPPON' itself, which is based on this belief, was in fact an unrealistic one. Of course, I have no intention of changing my beliefs. But I am afraid I do not have the courage to say 'we do not need these sort of car manufacturers any more' to the other two major car companies, and so I would like to give my sincere apologies to NISSAN about the unfairness. Although I admit my irrelevance and over-self-esteem, it does not mean that I have already given up. The story goes back a little bit. Since we released 'DOME F105', we received some interesting queries from overseas regarding F1 GP. Some of them were very appealing and worth considering. For example, Ado Malik Ibrahim, Prince of Nigeria, who is currently the owner of the Arrows F1 team, who in fact let this story slip in an interview for a specialised magazine, proposed to us that he would like to launch his own F1 team supplying all the necessary funding. We were involved in several discussions with him. Also, a major company in Europe, who has been sponsoring F1 teams for a long time, approached us saying that they are no longer interested in just sponsoring teams, but they would like to study the potential of starting a new team. We were in discussions with them as well. We could not finalise this deal as our plans based around the MUGEN engine came to a dead end. But we commonly learned through these negotiation processes that there seems to be a very limited number of constructors who can develop F1 chassis in the world, although the world is very wide. This gave us hope for the future. It may be very simple logic, but we thought like this. There is no need for us to adhere to Japanese technology as the pure Japanese racing car development technology did not bring any incentives. Now our new strategy is to assimilate into the centre of the motor sport industry in order to make DOME into a world famous racing car constructor. To this point DOME did not have enough technology exchange with the overseas racing industry, as we had stuck to our policy of developing our own 'Japanese technology'. |
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