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| May.31.1999 "F1GP-NIPPON CHALLENGE" STATUS REPORT | ||
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It has been nearly two years since I wrote my last status report on the 'F1 GP Challenge of NIPPON' in July 1997. During the next two years, the world of F1 GP has changed dramatically, and now there seems to be a war between car manufacturers across the world. I have to accept the fact that under current circumstances within F1 it has become more and more difficult for a private team like DOME to enter the field, but there have been several encouraging developments as well. So we have been continuing our efforts in order to be able to give you a good report. Our ultimate objective is to join the F1 GP, and we have not given up on this ideal. However, as the plan to join F1 under the concept of 'F1 GP Challenge of NIPPON' reached deadlock, and we were working hard to solve some basic issued in our subsequent plan to join F1 with Japanese hardware. In some ways it is as if the fog had suddenly cleared, and the next moment the ship ran aground, and it became really difficult for us to move off the rocks. I have decided to use this as a good opportunity for me to explain to you DOME's current situation with regard to our F1 GP participation project. You may find some explanations obscure. This is because we are concerned about our partners. I would appreciate if you could use your imagination wherever necessary to understand what I would like to say. ■ Background DOME Co.,Ltd. had set the ultimate objective to participate in F1 GP in 1986, and started developing a chassis for F3000, which is one rank lower than F1. This was done in order to learn about developing the technology suitable for a formula 1 chassis, which was necessary to achieve our objective. In 1994, we won the series championship title in the All Japan F3000 championship race. Soon after we started developing a proper F1 chassis. In 1996, the 10th year after starting this project, we developed a F1 prototype chassis called 'DOME F105', then started testing with it immediately. At the same time, we publicised our F1 GP scheme 'F1 GP Challenge of NIPPON', which is based on our principle of 'Challenge for F1 GP purely with Japanese technology' and continued our efforts to achieve this. ■Report We started our 'F1 GP Challenge of NIPPON' project in 1996 and keeping to our project's principle, began to approach several different parties in order to base not only the chassis but the engine, team structure, and even the driver on Japanese technology. One of the reasons we started this project when it seemed so premature was that participation in F1 from 1997 was very beneficial from a cost point of view due to the new regulation issues at the time. However, the biggest reason was that there was a wide spread belief that Honda might come back to F1 GP with an all Honda team. We believed that the participation of a pure Japanese team in F1 as a frontier trial would have significant meaning, merit, and necessity, and that it bore good possibility of coming true. |
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