Our challenge in the Le Mans 24 in 2005 could not achieve success,
though we had a very strong chance of winning it for the first
time in many years. The reason for this defeat was that our
machine could not demonstrate its potential because of errors
in setting up the wind-tunnel experiment data analysis program.
Perplexed by the unexpectedly poor performance of the machine,
team staff members were unable to handle the situation smoothly.
Accordingly, the race results were devastatingly poor. Nevertheless,
undiscouraged by these results, we will participate in the
2006 race with the Dome S101-Hbi (remodeled hybrid machine).
However, it seems that it will be difficult for us to participate
in the 2006 race on our own, because we are currently exhausted,
having poured excessive efforts into the 2005 race, and because
we will be busy during this year due to relocating our headquarters
to Maibara, Shiga Prefecture, in April, 2006.
We have therefore decided to rely entirely on Jan Lammers
of RFH (Racing for Holland) for our participation in the 2006
race. Dome will be responsible for renovating the machine,
transporting it to him, and sending an engineer who will support
the team. The machine’s renovation actually involved unimaginably
deeply-rooted problems. If we had thoroughly renovated the
machine to enable it to demonstrate as high performance as
initially planned, it would have required as much effort as
the development of a new machine from scratch. Supposing that
the 2005 model demonstrated 70% of its initially-planned performance,
we were only able to renovate the machine sufficiently to
demonstrate 85%.
Our challenge in the Le Mans 24 will continue to be difficult.
However, our basic policy since 1978 has been that if we did
not participate, no miracle would occur. Dome will participate
in the 2006 Le Mans 24, with this policy in mind.
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