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.