Ebbro Interview Part 7, Motorbike Craze and the F1 Winter



Motorbike Craze and the F1 Winter
--- all rights reserved, Model Graphix magazine Japan ---

----What other 1/12 motorbikes were you in charge of designing?

Um, let’s see…  The Suzuki GSX1100S Katana (sales date: June ’82), the Honda RS1000 Endurance Racer (Oct ’82), the Ducati 900 Mike Hailwood Replica (May ’83), and the Honda NS500 Grand Prix Racer (April ’84).

The RS1000 was also mass media, to tell a wider audience about the existence of the Suzuka 8 Hours endurance road race…  Yeah, and while we were starting up the 1/12 motorbike series, some Tamiya staff and I went to those 8 Hours races for a number of years.  We’d camp out and have barbeques, and have our drinks at night…

----So you carried some of the weight for that “mood” during the motor bike craze then, squarely on your shoulders.

Yeah, that’s kind of how it was.  With all the camping and barbequing, I came to have this “We’ve got to commercialize these 8 Hours machines!” attitude.  And you know, the Bol d'Or 24-hour endurance road race was too far away.  And unlike today, we didn’t have all this outside information all the time.

----So, you were smack dab in the middle of the motorbike craze at the time, but what we call the “winter” of F1 modeling had come by then.  After the 1/20 Brabham BT50 BMW Turbo (sales date: Feb ’83), we entered a quiet period that was 3 and a half years long.

Yeah, it was long, wasn’t it.  I was saying “I want to commercialize this, I want to commercialize that”, and kept on proposing projects “just in case” even when I’d half given up.

Then, when Honda came back to F1, I started working on strategies, talking with some people in Honda’s Motor Recreation Department who’d become acquaintances of mine saying “Can’t you open a way for us to commercialize?”, “It seems we both have common interests” (Note: what follows is a conversation some 10 minutes long, that we really can’t print in the magazine.)

… But, in doing so, things started moving briskly, once we’d finally arrived at commercialization of the Williams FW11 Honda (sales date: Oct ’86).  Then there was the Lotus Honda 99T (Oct ’87), mainly because Satoru Nakajima-san was driving it, and then I had no complaints.

----You know, when test shots of the FW11 arrived at the Model Graphix Editorial Department from Tamiya, I, like an idiot, thought “There must be 2 runners or so missing.  I wonder when they’ll come”.  I mean, that’s how few I thought the parts were.

Yes, yes, yes.  I was thinking after all “(the qualities and attributes of) our customer base is probably different now than before”.  I knew that people who had really loved F1 before would certainly buy it, but I thought it wouldn’t be very attractive for those who hadn’t, or for plastic model beginners interested in it because it’s an “F1 with a Honda engine”, if the thing couldn’t be built properly.

So it was a development concept change with a greatly reduced part number, but another thing was that the company had put a “You’ve got to bring the development costs down” condition on its commercialization.  With the same parts structure as we’d had before, the mold costs would’ve been enormous.

----But, in a compromising way, you were into a good rhythm.  You’d found a harmony between the cost shackles on you and a new concept beautifully.

Yes, that was how it was.  My reflections on the past up until that time, led me to choose for people who can assemble things, even with the 1/20, which was like a junior version of the 1/12.  So it was like “Let’s make things so that anyone can assemble them, and then we can keep it up over the long haul” and that led to having suspension arms made of ABS resin that are hard to break, and drastically reducing total part numbers.

----Still, you reduced the part numbers from 120 to 80 in one fell swoop…  In other words they were “3/4” kits.  You must’ve had a lot of conflict over that.

Of course I did.  But, I was happier about the “Finally being able to commercialize!” side of it you know.  I was trying to think positively, with a cut-and-dry “Let’s design even if we have to omit certain things” attitude.  But with the 1/12 Ferrari 641/2 which was special, we put our cut-and-dry attitude away and went all out on the designs, by doing things like having the engine and transmission made as a one-piece structure with a slide mold.

----From about what time, by the way, was 3D CAD/CAM (computer aided design / manufacturing) introduced with F1 models?

Um.., at the start of the ‘90s, we were still doing everything by hand.  Yeah, when I think about it, we hardly used CAD with any of the 1/20 F1.  I ended with the Lotus 25 Coventry Climax (sales date: Sept ’97), so CAD/CAM was used from about the Ferrari 310B (Dec ’97) I think.

----Did you ever learn any 2D CAD, while you were employed at Tamiya?

I learned some, but I didn’t have a chance to draw any blueprints with it, while I was at Tamiya.  By that time, I had already been put in charge of the Collector’s Club series (diecast miniature cars) at the Chinese factory we used, and had withdrawn from drawing blueprints.