Ebbro Interview Part 10, Historic F1 Possibilities


Historic F1 Possibilities
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----Well, now I’d finally like to turn our conversation to Ebbro’s embarking into 1/20 F1 plastic model development.  Fujimi’s announcement of its Ferrari 126C commercialization at the Shizuoka Hobby Show in May ’07, kicked off the recent 1/20 F1 models that have come out.  So, what do you think of this musical chairs game situation we’ve had with historic 1/20 F1 model commercialization in recent years Kiya-san, I mean, this whoever’s-first-wins state it’s become?

Ummm.., of course I have various thought on that, but I don’t really have anything to say about the individual products.

----But, you tried everything in your Tamiya days, to get the Honda RA272 (sales date: Dec ’96) and the Lotus 25 squeezed into the lineup, didn’t you?  Having done all that and cut costs to the limit to get them squeezed in, surely it must be pretty difficult sales wise for historic cars as compared to recent machines?

Yeah.  But when you add everything up now, I don’t think it changes much you know.  Besides, even when you commercialize current F1 machines, the first production lots are the only ones that sell properly.  I think we’re all in an “I don’t think sales will get any better beyond next year” situation now.

But historic cars are already old from the beginning, so I think that if you do them up properly, there’s no worry about them slowly but surely continuing to sell.  Thankfully our first Lotus 72E production lot sold out completely, and that’s a good example…  From the beginning, I’d always firmly believed that when commercializing older cars.

----Yeah, it’s okay to firmly believe that, but in actual fact, didn’t you really feel that “You can’t do business with historic cars” when you were a Tamiya employee?

No, not necessarily.  “There’s definitely a business opportunity there” was my thinking.

----Um, but when I talked with various model manufacturers back then about my “Let’s commercialize the Lotus 79!” proposition, they kept telling me “Well.., historics won’t sell…”

Yeah, but that’s the crux of it, isn’t it…  For example if you’re thinking short-term, you’re only saying like “If we invest 10-million this year, we can have 20-million in profit on 30-million in sales”.  But for us it’s like saying “If we invest 10-million, we can have 10-million in sales this year.  And from next year out to the 6th year, we’ll have about 5-million in sales every year, for a total of 35-million in sales.  Which do you think it better?”  That’s what I think the business model is all about with historic cars.  That’s why I was able to do those commercializations in my Tamiya years, and if I hadn’t been thinking that way, I would never have gotten those projects through in the midst of all the opposition.

And, in fact you get yearly sales data, don’t you?  When I saw those data at Tamiya, I knew “Oh, they (the calculations I was aiming for in the beginning) are going to fall into place in the end”.  And I had known that a way to commercialize them would open up, if someone could just see that.  It’s been like that with staple products in the resin kit world, and with Fujimi I thought “There must be someone who knows how to do the business model calculations there”.

----So for Ebbro, it’s not like you’ve just been riding on the recent craze for 1/20 historic F1 cars these days.

That’s right.  We were developing our diecast 1/20 Honda F1 series at the time, and I’d been thinking ahead to what I wanted to be doing after commercializing all those, and just as I thought “Plastic models would be more interesting than diecast after all” a fortuitous set of circumstances overlapped.  Whenever I went overseas on an errand, I’d been taking every chance I got to capture photos of actual cars on film at Classic Team Lotus and in museums.

Because, well, to be honest, after I’d commercialized the RA272 at Taimya, I wanted to continue with a series of the other earliest Honda F1 cars.  But soon I’d quit the company, and had this “How to continue with the projects of my Tamiya days” conflict within me, and thought “Then I’ll just commercialize them in diecast” and started commercialization of the earliest Honda F1 cars in diecast 1/20.  And, once that commercialization had settled in, I was thinking “Could I get back into the world of plastic models?” when I met Clive Chapman (see page 37 [not shown]), and when I explained my feelings to Clive, he said “Why not commercialize some of our team’s machines?”