18/12/2003
FEATURE BY MIKE LAWRENCE
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Why is it that Toyota cheats? I have never heard a breath of scandal about any other major manufacturer in motor sport, apart from NASCAR where ingenious cheating is applauded. You must read Tom Jensen's book, 'Cheating' (publ. David Bull, 2002), on the bad things good guys do to win in NASCAR. If you have never thought of building a car radio from solid lead, you are in need of education.
Why does Toyota cheat? It is not struggling to make its name. Take into account the burden of debt and Toyota could be argued to be Number One in the world. The point of any manufacturer is not to make product but to make money and Toyota is excellent at both, so why does Toyota cheat? It has to be part of the company's culture.
Toyota is the only manufacturer to have been excluded from the World Rally Championship and the President of the company has had to make a public apology because the company was discovered to be alerting mechanics in its dealerships to questions to be set in a national examination. No Westerner can possibly imagine the pain this must have caused him because we have no equivalent to the shame of 'losing face'. The English language does not even have an adequate word to translate the Japanese concept of 'face'.
Time was when a man in the President's position would have resigned and led a secluded life, at the very least. We are talking of a level of shame which might have called for hari-kari, ritual self-disembowelment. The matter is that serious yet it has hardly been mentioned in the Western press.
In the first case, the exclusion from the WRC, Toyota claimed it was done at 'a certain level'; in the second, a public apology from the President, two individuals have been identified and blamed. In the case of Toyota copying the Ferrari F2002, as soon as the police raided the team's headquarters and invited Angelo Santini to help with their enquiries, the team distanced itself from Santini, though did not sack him.
The Cologne police took away computers and they should be able to find the e.mail sent to employees earlier in 2003 instructing them to destroy anything traceable to Ferrari. I know who sent it, and it was not someone as junior as Santini.
Piero Ferrari has said that it is too easy to download data to a CD. Are we to infer from this that Sig. Ferrari knows that this was done? Were I in his position, the first thing I'd do if I suspected something like this had happened, would have been to have the hard disks of computers used by suspects to be examined.
When did you last read a public statement from Sig. Ferrari? Piero Ferrari is Enzo's son from an extra-marital affair, whom Enzo recognised and supported, and to whom he left his shares in Scuderia Ferrari. Normally it is Luca di Montezemolo who speaks on the Scuderia's behalf. For Piero Ferrari to speak is rare and his words must be given unusual weight.
The Modena prosecutor's office had to have hard evidence to be able to convince the German police to act. Toyota GmbH, after all, is an asset to Cologne. It employs several hundred local people while the international brigade is extremely well paid and contributes millions of Euros to the local economy. On top of that there is the prestige of a company like Toyota choosing Cologne as the base for its Formula One team.
Like Italy, Germany is a federation of once-independent states, though Germany has a considerably shorter history as a united country. You do not see many Fords in Bavaria, for example, yet Fords are made in Germany, in Cologne. Outside of churches in Bavaria you will see incredibly high maypoles and it is sport for the lads of one village to kidnap the maypole of another, but you do not see such maypoles in the North. Lederhosen is Bavarian, you'd freeze in Prussia if you wore leather breeches.
Bavarians tell dumkopf jokes about Prussians and Prussians tell the same jokes about Bavarians. The French tell exactly the same jokes about the Belgians, as do the Dutch, and Scandinavians about the Norwegians. They are the same jokes that the English used to tell about the Irish (and the Irish about Kerrymen), until Political Correctness stamped out all that nonsense which was vile and demeaning, apart from the one about the Irishman and the penguin.
Or the one about the Seven Dwarves in the Vatican, and the penguin.
Or the one whose punch-line is: "You should have been here yesterday, some stupid **** was ******* a penguin."
Neither I, nor pitpass, has any truck with such offensive stuff which some lackwits describe as 'humour', but have you heard the one about the Irishman who mistook a penguin for a nun?
Other than Sauber in Switzerland, Toyota is the only F1 team not based in Italy or England so imagine that you are the police chief of Cologne and you are asked to raid one of the jewels in the local crown. You would need more than mere suspicion before you approached a judge for a search warrant, you would need hard evidence. The judge would need very good evidence. Germany has an excellent reputation for its current legal system, but no judge works in isolation.
When the search warrant was signed, the judge knew that the story would be reported in many countries. The judge knew that Cologne would be mentioned, it had to be under the basic journalistic rule of Who, Where, When, What and Why? Despite all that the police chief sanctioned an approach to a judge who was sufficiently convinced by proffered evidence to sign a warrant.
When you examine all the evidence in context, a picture emerges. To do so, you have to remove the blinkers which are typical of Formula One and look at such basic issues as how you get a search warrant. Why has no journalists in the print medium asked this simple question? I will let you into a secret, hardly one of them is very bright. Manipulative, self-serving, cunning, possessed of animal intelligence, all the rest, and easily bought with favours, that much is true, but most are not very bright.
If any one of the current batch of Formula One journalists was bright enough to do their job properly, they would have asked how does someone in Italy get a search warrant in Germany? It is the responsibility of any proper journalist to ask such a question.
Journalists do not have a great public image, and there is a good reason for that, but Charles Dickens was a journalist, so was Daniel Defoe, Mark Twain and Winston Churchill. It was The Sunday Times which forced the thalidomide issue to the fore, in the days when it was a proper newspaper.
Here is another question: what favours has Toyota handed out to hacks? I intend to expose the gift system in journalism unless, of course, Chris Balfe and I receive interesting cars on indefinite loan for assessment purposes. That is the formula used to cover what is, in essence, bribery.
It is my contention, and it can be no more than an argument, is that the Toyota Motor Corporation has developed a culture where such corruption may happen. It began with the very first car in 1936. Toyota bought chassis and transmissions from Chevrolet, but made their own engine. The engine, however, was a faithful copy of a Chevy unit, passed off as a Toyota design, while the body was a copy of the Chrysler 'Airflow'.
Ever since then, Toyota has copied. Toyota's success, which is remarkable, has been based on its looking at the market and making a better version at a keener price. You will not hear a bad word from me about the quality of Toyota's road cars, but when did Toyota innovate? I have never driven a Toyota which I have wanted to own, not even the original MR2 which was a very clever piece of kit. You could argue for the Toyota Prius, a dual fuel car, but that idea has been around for almost as long as the motor car.
Most of my readers will have grown up with a positive view about Japanese technology. Japanese cars set new standards for quality and value in the 1970s and Japanese innovations like the Sony Walkman are now ingrained in the fabric of our lives. It was not always like that. In the 1950s Japan specialised in making cheap, inferior, copies of Western goods. 'Made in Japan' was in very small letters on tat bought from market stalls, which fell apart within a week.
Japan's image was so poor that a village in Japan was renamed 'Sweden' so that the matches made in a local factory could bear the tag, 'Made in Sweden'. Japan was Frank Z. Sinatra.
There was a time when car magazines ran pieces on the Tokyo Motor Show as light relief. How we used to snigger at the weird and wonderful little runabouts on show. The only 'real' cars made in Japan in the late 1950s were built by a company called 'Prince'. Have you ever seen a Prince outside of Japan? Hand on heart, have you even heard of Prince? Prince was absorbed into Nissan in 1966.
Japan became a major force in the automotive world by making a product which suited most people. The styling was sometimes eccentric and it was not until the late 1980s that Japanese makers learned that the front end of a car should be in harmony with the rear end, but buyers got what we all want: all the bells and whistles as standard and peace of mind. I can remember when a heater was an optional extra on European cars and when a basic radio was the height of luxury. Japan deserves its success and no maker deserves it more than Toyota. Toyota sells what millions of people want, as does MacDonald's.
In 1954, Soichiro Honda visited Europe and, in particular, he visited the Isle of Man TT races where he was bowled over by the small-capacity NSU motorcycles from Germany. At the time, Mr Honda had started his automotive concern using ex-military 50cc generator two-stroke motors and converting them into a unit you could add to a push-bike.
Nobody outside of Japan heard of these or of Honda's first original designs. In 1959, Honda sent a team of 125cc 'bikes to the Isle of Man, where they were regarded with polite curiosity. When they arrived, it was basically 'pat on the head' time, it was 'You have come many miles from home, without adult supervision? Jolly well done.'
Honda arrived with novice riders, who had never seen anything like the TT course - you have to see it to believe it - yet left with the team prize and a great deal of respect.
Only three years later I was at a meeting at Cadwell Park and Jim Redman arrived with a 250cc Honda. The field was good, with lots of national aces. At the time, Britain dominated motorcycle production and bred many of the world's top riders. Redman/Honda finished the first lap four seconds ahead of the field and, after the second lap, the lead was eight seconds, and so it went on. You had to be very dim not to realise that something was going on.
By 1965, just six years after a Honda had even been seen outside of Japan, Honda was the world's largest maker of motorcycles and was consigning most of the British industry to history. Honda was not only making cars, most of which were rather silly, but exporting them. In 1965, Honda also won its first World Championship F1 race to add to its growing tally of motorcycle World Championships.
Soichiro Honda brought advanced engineering within the reach of everyone, and achieved the rare trick of translating success on the track into sales, yet he did something even more radical, he broke the mould of Japanese industrial culture. Under the old system, his son would have been in line for a job with Honda, yet he was shunted out and given Mugen to run. Mr Honda reasoned that if his company was ever seen as a family dynasty, he would not attract the very best recruits.
Porsche faced the same problem in the late 1970s and so shunted off some very talented members of the extended family to create Porsche Design.
Honda also understood the power of motor racing to develop engineering. As soon as he could, he formed alliances with English constructors. The first was in Formula Two with Brabham in 1965, which few people remember because at the first race, at Silverstone, Jack Brabham was eight seconds off the pace. That raced was cancelled because of a monsoon, and at the second, Oulton Park, Jack started from the last row. He'd had no major dramas apart from a terrible engine.
Things improved over the season and at the end, Jack and his partner, Ron Tauranac, flew to Japan and laid down the law. One problem was that the engine was top-heavy so it wrecked the balance of the car; another was that the shape of the engine block made it difficult to design a chassis for it. In other words, the engine had been designed in isolation and the fact that it worked on a dynometer was not the whole story.
Two engineers, Tadushi Kume and Nobuhiko Kawamoto were sent to a hotel at a seaside resort to design a new engine. They were officially on holiday because they had to work impossible hours and a trade union would have something to say if they tried working the same hours at the factory.
A completely new engine was designed and built in three months and Brabham-Honda utterly dominated the 1966 F2 season. Brabham-Honda won every race save the last when Jack was pipped by Jochen Rindt's Brabham-Cosworth by a tenth of a second. Kume and Kawamoto would become, respectively, the second and third Presidents of Honda.
Honda has always used Formula One to develop engineers and it has gone to English teams to teach these engineers to think in a different way. In motor racing, you have to think on your feet and not call a committee meeting for the day after next. That aspect has always been one of the main reasons for Honda going motor racing.
The ride has not always been easy. In 1982, Honda supplied engines for an F2 project called 'Team Spirit', organised by John Wickham and Gordon Coppuck. Spirit employed Stefan Johansson and Thierry Boutsen as drivers. Stefan was the quicker over a single lap, but it was Thierry who delivered the team's four wins and who came close to winning the F2 title.
Honda had a deal with Williams in the pipe-line, I once saw Mr. Kawamoto hand over a turbo section to Patrick Head. When I mentioned this to Patrick, he said that Kawamoto was no more than an old friend, but he did have a gleam in his eye. Honda entered the turbo-era of Formula One with Spirit and a single car. Who was to get the drive, Stefan or Thierry?
Thierry had to be the favourite, in fact his name was pencilled-in on the contract. He did not have the outright speed of Johansson, but he was the better test driver and he produced wins. 'Steve Johnson', who is a wonderful guy, actually won very few races, while Boutsen was on the F1 podium 15 times, three times on the top spot.
Thierry was the shoo-in favourite. While Spirit-Honda was testing in the relative seclusion of California, Thierry walked into the pits with his girlfriend, who was Japanese. Within seconds, the Japanese engineers formed their own huddle. Thierry had introduced a Japanese woman into a Japanese man's workplace and that was an unforgivable sin.
Guess who got the Spirit-Honda F1 drive for 1983? It was Stefan, and he got the drive because of Thierry's faux pas, which tells you something about how drivers get into Formula One.
Honda has only entered one international rally and that was in 1963. Manufacturers enter rallies for publicity and image building, not to effect any change on the way they operate. Honda goes racing to inject the racer's attitude into its most promising engineers. Most manufacturers, including Toyota, have come into Formula One as a marketing ploy. Honda achieves its ends by putting its engineers through the mill, Toyota has to achieve results to justify its massive investment which includes, you will recall, an entire year of running F1 cars without entering a race.
In the early 1980s, Toyota built three different types of turbocharged F1 engine and did not enter Formula One for reasons which remain unclear. In fact, I was only told about the engine programmes when a Toyota PR man got pissed on a car launch early in 1985 and wanted to show off.
If you want to understand why Toyota cheats, you look at the corporate culture. Toyota has always copied, it is part of the company's culture. By contrast, there has not been even a whisper about Honda. Soichiro Honda was himself a racing driver and special builder. Mr Honda's successors as President, Kume and Kawamoto, had both been racing mechanics and are proud of the fact.
It's all a matter of culture, which is also the reason why you will not find Toyota's cheating highlighted in the motor racing press.
To check out Mike's previous articles for pitpass... click here