Apr.30.2002　
Introduction of the series of
"Dome F1 Adventure Behind The Scene Story"
From 1996 to 1997, Dome was working on a F1 challenge plan with pure Japanese technology We received so much concrete response from abroad rather than from Japan against our will and there were all sorts of stories; some were obviously doggy but others were very serious ones. We thought we should challenge with pure Japanese engineering technology when we started but as less attention we got from Japanese companies, the less we were excited about it. In the latter half of 1997, we decided we would not mind anything if we could run Dome chassis car in F1 Grand Prix, and we started negotiations with some people with decent possibilities in their offer.
Mr. Marick, Nigerian Price, who contacted us in the early stage, was the most eager person. Though there was much to sort out, it was nothing like we were fooled or lose money so we decided to go ahead with him.
After some meetings in England, he wanted to see us urgently and came to Japan. When he arrived in Japan, I was organizing a "Obake", annual event in a fleshpot in Kyoto. As I could not cancel it, I decided to meet him in the house where the "Obake" was held.
"Obake" is a traditional ceremony; geisha girls and customers in disguise hop one party to another and they do performance in front of the guests.
Marick had never been to Japan before. He was brought to a very old Japanese traditional house in Kyoto where the ceremony was held straight from the airport.
He was very puzzled to see lots of beautiful people serving food after food, lots of performers in strange clothes came and performed continuously. He misunderstood that I was some kind of aristocracy who lived in the old house and had such parties every night. It was rather doubtful Marick was Prince and my being aristocratic didn't become even a laughingstock. The F1 challenge plan we were involved went through unexpected deployments later and Marick bought Arrows though it was only temporarily as he was kicked out after losing battles with his enemies in a short period of time.
Then we became in charge of design for a Dutch company's F1 challenge plan, and we literally went all over the world to set up a F1 racing team, or buying one. The outstanding performance Mr. Sasaki made (Director of DOME || COLUMN , who were in charge of all negotiations) for this project could be called " F1 Adventure Story" and too good to be ignored. Therefore I asked him to write a series in this column. There are lots of people with lots of ulterior motives behind the glamorous F1 world. We could not do anything during the current car manufacturers -oriented bubble economy era, but when the bubble economy era's gone, we believe a chance will come even to us and you may understand why we believe so if you read this.
Sasaki is traveling all over the world and I cannot tell you how much he can write in such circumstance but please enjoy Dome's F1 Adventure Behind the Scene stories.

Minoru Hayashi