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| Wednesday, 5-Nov-2008 18:33 |
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Info and photos on Track Kampung Gajah - Perak
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Lobby Building
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Eagle View
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Inside Resort 1
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Inside Resort 2
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Twin-Bed
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Swimming Pool
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Map to Kg Gajah
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For your information, the track is on the small island in Kg. Gajah; called Pulau Dato Sagor. It is approximately 180km from KL and takes roughly 2 hours (if you're driving 110 - 120 km/h) from KL . It's about 30-45 mins from Ipoh. For the information on the resort, kindly call Pasir Salak Resort at 05 631 8999. The normal rate = RM160 per chalet. If you guys are sharing, you have 4 beds in 2 rooms, which makes around RM40 per person per night. The Pasir Salak Resort is located less than 1km from Dato' Sagor Track; actually at the back of the resort.
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| Sunday, 12-Oct-2008 02:11 |
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Alfa 75 Turbo - 1
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| Monday, 7-Jul-2008 22:05 |
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What is Strategic Marketing?
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It may be a bit weird for a car enthusiast to like this kind of topic, wheras he should be talking about handling or vehicle dynamics. Anyway, I have passion for cars but at the same time I like teaching as giving back some knowledge to the students is something to satisfy my inner needs. Though I have been in the auto industry since "Day 1" but please don't get me wrong, that I still love teaching; but my interest in cars in huge; and I have rejected the offer to do my Ph.D is just because I was called to work with a car company. Let's forget about the past and life has to go on and insyaAllah I'll continue that soon.
Marketing, as a functional discipline, has had to reinvent itself more than once during the last decade. Remember the distinction in the 1980s between “sales oriented” and “marketing oriented” companies? The first big change was during the early 1990s when marketing was routed from it pedestal in “marketing oriented” companies to become the handmaiden of branding. Now, as branding has become the province of executive leadership, brand management and marketing strategy are being forced to step beyond the confines of the marketing profession per se, to demonstrate new strategic and cross-disciplinary ability to deliver on non-marketing business goals.
As the marketplace has become more difficult to command, competition more intense, and profit margin thinner, questions have emerged about the ability of marketing to deliver the growth and margins it was once vaunted for.
Many believe the problem lies with marketers themselves. These critics say that because marketers are accustomed to thinking only within their discipline about vehicles and share and promotions, they lack the ability to step outside and above their profession, to strategize about emerging trends, broad market opportunities, competitive advantage, and deliver on overarching business goals. Critics of the profession claim that traditional marketers and brand managers may be great tacticians, but that they rarely think strategically about the marketplace, adapt strategies and ideas from other industries, or derive lessons from other sectors
In order to become strategic thinkers who can renew their professional contribution, while still managing the tactics of the discipline of marketing, marketers must learn to think at a higher level about the marketplace. It is no longer enough to speak of integrated branding and marketing programs. Now marketing must achieve business goals too.
What, then, is required to make marketing strategic? How can marketers achieve a macrocosmic view of the landscape within which their discipline works? How can they generate strategic insights to guide their tactical activities? As a start, marketing managers and leaders must:
Look beyond their own profession to what is happening at the top of the organization, and with understanding shape and integrate their goals and activities to simultaneously deliver upon those business and financial goals. This requires that marketers learn about the concerns of finance, sales, manufacturing, and R&D in order to guide marketing effectively and ensure organzational synergy.
Look beyond their own organization to understand the trends within their industry and beyond to other indus-tries and sectors, and then, to adapt these lessons for the benefit of their company. Too often marketing managers think only about their own segment or industry.
Ask what data and information mean and thus develop insights about consumer, customer, industry, and societal trends. Marketers who obtain a macrocosmic view of their work and its contribution to the success of their company are in a prime position to ask what data and information mean and thus to derive the important insights that enable a strategic contribution to their company.
Direct with insight outside agencies and staff personnel to provide targeted and heightened contributions. Strategic marketers must impart their expanded view of the situation to those who serve them and judge their contributions in its light.
Do what is right for the business, such that decisions are not just driven by profession or discipline-specific considerations. Haven’t we all dealt with “creatives” who made their decision according to what was “creative,” irrespective of what was best for the company?
...questions have emerged about the ability of marketing to deliver the growth and margins it was once vaunted for.
The call for strategic marketing is urgent. For example, how can marketers think well about the positioning of their company brand, its brand strategy, or an advertising campaign without an analytic understanding of the market landscape, the greater economic world, and the macro-trends that are changing both the marketplace and the consumer every day?
Strategic marketers must merge the best practices of their professional discipline with the far-ranging vision of strategic thinking to effectively impact both their organization and the marketplace.
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| Monday, 7-Jul-2008 21:59 |
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Branding II
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Analyze You Competition & Realign Your Brand
With the basic elements of your branding strategy in place, you should begin to extend your branding across the marketplace. This is important because much of your strategy’s effectiveness lies in its consistency. To ensure this is achieved, it must be remembered that each time a potential customer or regular customer has any kind of contact with your firm, whether through visiting your company’s website online or simply in seeing a printed advertisement, he or she has what should be understood as a branding experience.
Bearing this in mind, it becomes clear why regularly fine-tuning your branding strategy to better suit the desires of your customers is absolutely crucial. This is especially true if your firm is in a particularly competitive market, up against several rival products or services which claim to do what yours does, and possibly even better, through their own branding. It is specifically your branding that will separate your product from the competitors.
To ensure your branding maintains a strong statement and to continue differentiating it from your rivals’, you will need to regularly assess the competition in your particular market. To perform what could be called a competitive analysis, you should keep track of your competitors’ branding by taking clippings of their advertisements, reviewing any PR coverage they have achieved, researching their online presence by analyzing their website, and even by trying their products or services — especially if they have introduced new products or branding strategies. Then you should decide what especially continues to make your product different — what sets it apart from the rest. It will always be this differentiation that allows you to create an image that remains in customers' imaginations. Therefore, you should continue to be willing to realign your branding strategy to fulfill this fact.
Create A Slogan
Once you have selected an appropriate name, logically the next stage in the branding process is to accompany this with a slogan, or statement summing up your intentions and strengths. For the most effective branding results, the slogan you select should be a short sentence which is memorable or ‘catchy’ and, again, easily remembered by customers. This will then combine with your name to strengthen the branding structures working for your product.
Slogans can be just as difficult as names to create. Saying something powerful and original in a small number of words is a tough part of the branding process. In order to generate ideas for slogans to lead your branding, you should always stay focused on the potential customer. What are they looking for in a product such as yours? What values and aspirations do they expect from a firm producing it? Why should they buy your product in particular? What do the products and slogans of your rivals represent? The slogan you choose should attempt to take into account strong answers to each of these questions.
To help understand why this stage of the branding process is so important; think about slogans prevalent in popular culture today. The phrase ‘Just do it’, representing a proactive, energetic and no-fuss attitude to life, instantly recalls the branding of Nike. When seen, either on billboards or on Nike clothing itself, the customer takes in both these represented values and the Nike name, and comes more and more to associate them as a permanent combination. This is branding at its most effective, and is what anyone or firm choosing a slogan should seek to emulate.
Get The Message Out
Once the above elements of your branding are ready to be put into effect, you should start to think about where your branding campaign is going to be targeted — which areas do you want to reach, and what kind of people do you want to be affected by your branding? In brainstorming at this stage, you should seek to analyze every possibility open to your product, and begin to analyze the feasibility of your firm gaining a presence in these areas.
Like the selection of your branding itself generally, the selection of potential advertising locations for your branding depends heavily on the profile of your desired customer — a profile you will have gauged from the early steps of developing a branding strategy. Think about what your targeted customer does in their daily life. What do they read? Which websites do they visit? Where do they go? What films and television shows do they watch? Where do they eat and drink? Once you have a clearer picture of these things, you should start preparing advertising material and ‘message’ within your branding with which to target these areas.
Different advertising formats require different designs to be effective as part of your branding. You should analyze advertising you know to have been effective, and ask why. If you can afford it, specialists should be brought in to aid you with this stage of the branding process. Online, print, billboard and other locations can then be targeted with branding messages to your potential customers, letting them know that your product is available and persuading them that they want it.
Consolidate Your Message
Each time a customer interacts with any part of your branding strategy, they must know what to expect. This must be an absolutely consistent message. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that your branding strategy is uniform across all marketing channels. You should begin to self-criticize your branding strategy. How consistently is the branding message being communicated? Are any of the messages being delivered through your various programs conflicting?
An obvious example is closely integrating the web and ‘real world’ elements of your branding. Clearly, your online branding strategy — from your website’s main content to soliciting email responses — must be integrated completely with your offline, ‘real world’ branding strategy. This will enable you to deliver one, clear branding message, incorporating the same related logos, slogans and general design elements across a variety of advertising formats. This unified approach to branding is vital if you are to make the most of each of the elements of your strategy.
You should always be willing to fine-tune your branding strategy. This can be done most simply via self-assessment — straightforwardly analyzing what you are doing and thinking of ways in which it could be improved and made into more effective and successful branding. Your firm’s branding and communications should in effect be audited — is there money being spent on branding which is going to waste? Could resources be more effectively allocated elsewhere? In doing this you will constantly be improving and honing your branding strategy.
Analyze Your Customers
It is one thing to analyze your rivals’ branding strategies and work to differentiate yours from theirs, but quite another to be sure that your realigned branding strategy will definitely be effective. Once you know what in particular separates your product from its competitors, you should then seek to discover whether placing this at the forefront of your branding strategy will continue to be popular with your potential customers, and if not, what in fact will. Your branding can then be realigned again.
Important, therefore, is to discover how well you really know and understand them and their aspirations. By thoroughly researching — through online forums, mail-out surveys, focus groups etc — and creating a clear portrait of what your customers want, you will be able to better focus your branding endeavors. Doing this will also enable you to send your branding message to the type of audience that will be most receptive to the original or unique elements of your product, again giving focus to your branding strategy.
However, in this stage of the branding process, it is important to bear in mind that you cannot please every customer in the marketplace. In fact, attempting to make you or your product ‘all things to all people’ will only result in a vague, diluted and rather weak branding. Whereas, clearly defined branding differentiation, based on what your most valuable customers desire, need and generally value the most will result in strong branding and sales.
Let's Innovate The Brand
Delivering on the above branding strategies should bring custom and loyalty from your potential clients. But to ensure their loyalty and faith in your products, and continuing success for your branding, it must be seen to be truthful and honest. The expectations raised by the branding must be felt by consumers to have been met. Therefore, it is not advisable for a branding strategy to market a product as the ‘premier’ example in its field if it is in fact inferior to several other well-known competitors.
Provided you do live up to your branding efforts in this way, the custom it will bring should enable you to succeed competitively, even become a marketplace leader. But this in itself brings requirements as well. To perform like a leader, and to suggest this is true in your branding, means making good on your new branding promises. This essentially requires innovation, leading the way in technologies in your industry and continuing to steal a march on competitors by releasing series of leading products. Customers want to purchase from the leaders in industries, and those who can proudly boast to be so, not usually from middling firms behind the times.
More than ever before, customers consider the wider-ranging experience they enjoy with products, and take this into account before making their purchases, particularly ones of significant cost to them. Consumers now look at multiple product reviews online, read in-depth pieces of information on competing products and pay a lot of attention to testimony from consumer-peers so they may feel confident that their purchase will live up to expectations produced by branding campaigns. In conclusion, this makes matching your branding strategy with real results ever more important. The delivery of effective product becomes branding in and of itself as customers compare experiences and breed more custom and loyalty to your brand.
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| Monday, 7-Jul-2008 21:48 |
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Branding I
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Ever since I was "introduced" to a brand management planning while I was at General Motors; I feel that this topic is very important especially to those who are seeking to place their mark on the business platform. Some of the articles here may give some lights to those who love brand management.
Branding
Branding is the creation and development of your company's brand: the logo, images, slogans, ideas and other information connected to your company or product. Branding is what makes your company recognizable and unique, and this site will provide valuable research points to help get you started.
The Brand has risen to occupy a place of paramount importance on the pages of such stalwart business publications as Financial World, Business Week, and Fortune magazine. In the 90’s, when these reputable magazines first started reporting financial valuations for brands, much to everyone’s surprise, these valuations were often greatly in excess of the annual revenues of the companies surveyed. As the reality and significance of these numbers sunk into the corporate world, the concept of “the Brand” quickly rose to a new level of strategic significance.
Still many start-ups, technology driven companies, and others in business-to-business and non-consumer markets fail to recognize that this Brand phenomenon applies to all organizations. These individuals have been accustomed to thinking of brands as a “marketing concern,” or as only of interest to those who provide consumer goods or services. However, the Brand, in virtue of its significant financial value, and enormous potential to drive economic markets, has become a major strategic factor in the corporate world providing competitive advantage, delivering shareholder value, creating wealth, and ensuring social prosperity.
The Emergence of the Brand
Fifteen years ago “the Brand” wasn’t even on the radar screen for senior corporate executives. At best, “the brand,” was limited to the marketing department of consumer packaged goods enterprises as a tool of marketing.
But then, during the early 1990s, a new corporate strategy, “growth through acquisitions,” emerged and initiated a now famous wave of merger and acquisition activity that has lasted until our present day. However, as visionary corporate executives began to acquire companies, they encountered an unforeseen obstacle in setting the value of their acquisition targets. In days past, book value and some multiple of revenues had been adequate to strike an acquisition deal. But suddenly, attractive companies, with enhanced market capitalizations, weren’t to be had at book value driven prices because of their “intangible assets.” As accommodations were reached and increasingly pricey deals were struck, a whole new concept emerged that has since found its way into the top ranks of corporate management. It was the concept of “intellectual capital,” and it came to refer to a range of intangible intellectual assets, but most primarily, as so many of these early and astounding deals revolved around famous brands, to “the Brand.”
As we look back today, we can see that the beginning of the decade of the 1990s was the beginning of a tremendous increase in economic activity worldwide. Mergers, acquisitions, new financial vehicles, and complex business arrangements emerged to radically change the economic landscape and companies of every shape and size for the better. During this time, mergers and acquisitions were revealing that what made a company attractive to an acquirer often wasn’t captured on its balance sheet, be it a famous brand or patented technology or the promise of a totally revolutionary business concept.
The Theory of the Brand
The strategic thinking surrounding brands advanced by leaps and bounds during the 1990s to become the province of the most successful executives and strategic thinkers.
Spurred by the emerging theory of intellectual capital assets, the Brand was soon recognized as the ultimate intellectual capital asset, the raison d’etre for all other forms of intellectual capital, and as an end-in-itself for any and every successful enterprise, undertaking, or corporate entity.
For the most effective branding, a memorable name and a ubiquitous slogan should be combined with an instantly recognizable and unique logo. A logo is the graphic or design by which your firm or product will come to be imagined by the customer. As in other elements of branding, simplicity can often be the best strategy. Your logo can be as straightforward as a simple geometric shape or, potentially, an elaborate design of a simple idea — such as a silhouette of a person or an object. In contrast to other elements of branding, your logo needn’t in itself be a clear representation of what your firm does, or what your product is. Its most important factor is being recognizable and unique.
To use another of the most famous examples from popular branding, Kentucky Fried Chicken’s logo is the ‘Colonel Sanders’ design — a smiling image of the face of the firm’s founder. In itself, this iconic branding doesn’t represent ‘chicken’, or even food of any kind. But it is remembered in association with the name of the firm, meaning that as a whole package, its branding successfully keeps the firm lodged in its customers’ memories.
Once the logo has been chosen, it should be used regularly and consistently throughout your branding strategy, in order to represent your firm or product wherever possible. You should combine the elements of your branding — firm name, slogan and logo — on each piece of correspondence you make or advertising space you buy related to your product. This means that emails, letterheads, business cards and invoices, and promotion and advertising, should bear the main elements of your branding. In doing this, your branding will be extended to the reaches of everything you and your products do, and will continue to spread the word of your growing success
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| Friday, 4-Jul-2008 08:31 |
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Suzuki Swift Cup
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The season is about to get underway with an exciting new class of racing in New Zealand motorsport.
With support from Suzuki New Zealand, WINTEC and Winger
Suzuki, the Suzuki Swift Sport Cup series is designed for aspiring drivers looking for an affordable and super-competitive start.
Built on the standard production Swift Sport 1600 with class rules set by Motor Sport New Zealand, the cars are race-modified to set specifications to ensure even competition. It all comes down to driver skill and the will to win.
This is your chance to get behind the wheel of a suberbly set up race car and make your mark in the exciting world of motorsport.
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| Friday, 4-Jul-2008 08:07 |
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Who is Nobuhiro Tajima - Suzuki Sport
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Nobuhiro 'Monster' Tajima (Shinjitai: 田嶋 伸博, Tajima Nobuhiro?, Japanese nickname Monsuta Tajima), is a hillclimb racer, tuning shop owner, rally team manager and former rally driver who is best known for his involvement of Suzuki's involvement in rallying and also is largely best known for his association in Pikes Peak International Hillclimb, mainly through his car's appearances in video games.
Tajima made his race debut in 1968 in the All Japan Dirt Trial Championship which he won his first race and his first involvement in WRC was in the 1981 Lombard RAC Rally.
In 1983 he established Monster International a motorsport preparation shop. In 1986, he sealed his association with Suzuki when he established Suzuki Sports, its in-house motorsport division and returned to the World Rally scene when he competed driving a Suzuki Cultus in the Olympus Rally.
In 1987, he in the Olympus Rally which he took his first class win, finishing 15th overall and returned again for the following year which he finished 7th and another class win and as well as this, he competed in the FIA Asia Pacific Rally Championship.
As the Junior World Rally Championship project took off in 2002, he decided to retire from rally driving when he was competing in the Asia Pacific Rally to become its team manager, he has continued to compete in Hillclimbing which he best known for, first on his debut driving in the Unlimited category in 1992 with a specially built twin engined Suzuki Cultus, then again in 1995 with a rebodied twin engined Suzuki Escudo. For the following year, he would make its debut in a car he became famous for, the V6 Suzuki Escudo which he used it to compete in Pikes Peak, finishing second, only to lose to Rod Millen's Toyota Celica that broke the course record two years before and would make it first win in the 1998 Queenstown Gold Rush International Auto Hill Climb and another two for the following years.
Suzuki XL7 at the 2007 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb during the record breaking runIn 1999, his car became famous when it debuted in Sony PlayStation driving game Gran Turismo 2, which due to its gigantic horsepower, it became the game's best loved car by gamers and would appear in all subsequent series.
In 2006, at the Geneva Motor Show, he announced his plan for Suzuki Sport to form the Suzuki World Rally Team, fielding a Suzuki SX4 in 2007, but with World Rally Championship calendar changes Suzuki will now debut in 2008. Tajima would take in Pikes Peak that year with a newer version of the Vitara, despite crashing during practice he took another overall victory in a race that was shortened by rain. In all he has taken nine All Japan Dirt Trial Championship title, four WRC championship class wins, two class wins in the Asia Pacific Rally championship and seven Race to the Sky overall victory. He also scored four points in the 1988 World Rally Championship season and finished 4th in the 2001 Asia Pacific Rally championship for drivers.
On July 21, 2007, Tajima bested Rod Millen's thirteen year old course record at the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb in his Suzuki Sport XL7, becoming the fastest man in the history of the race, with a time of 10:01.41.[1]
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| Friday, 4-Jul-2008 07:58 |
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Suzuki WRC - Interview with Najima
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The WRC is the pinnacle of production-car-based motorsports. There are lots of closed-circuit competitions like the Formula-1, but they’re all for dedicated racing vehicles specially prepared for the purpose from top to bottom. In the WRC, our challenge, champions are those who can get their machines, based on cars with over 25,000 units in production and with only limited modifications allowed, to run, compete, survive and win in all kinds of natural settings, every type of tough conditions from icy roads in Monte Carlo, snow-covered minus 30 Celsius climates in Sweden to hot 30-to-40-degree conditions in Greece where temperatures inside the vehicles can reach 60 degrees. It doesn’t come easy, but I’m ready to give it my best, around the clock and all through the calendar.
We accepted the challenge, and we’re determined to win no matter what it takes. Easier said than done, naturally. Hopefully, with all our hard-working staff and with the precious support of our fans around the world, we’ll be moving ahead toward reaching our goal.
The SX4, firstly, has excellent body rigidity; I think it’s an outstandingly tough body in its class. Another good thing is, because it already has large-size tires in production form for stable driving performance, the wheelstroke is quite long to begin with. We have lots of room for tire movement up and down, and that’s a big advantage in developing it for the WRC, in terms of providing better traction after big jumps, and driving performance over depressions on rough courses.
I’d like to mention one technical detail. The front pillars on this car are deeply inclined, and by fitting the roll cage in a way that it runs down along these pillars, it reaches the front suspension top mounts in a straight line, and as a result, the loading inputs to the front suspension can be delivered from the top mounts through the roll cage to the entire chassis in a well-dispersed manner, by which they are more effectively absorbed, This allowed us to come up with a very good roll-cage design. This is just an example of how the original SX4 body is wonderfully suited as a basis for manufacturing a World Rally Car.
Compared to its rivals, the SX4’s big advantage is its compactness. Looking at all 16 WRC rounds, maybe in the really high-speed courses, the big-body machines might have an edge in handling stability and so they might have some advantage over us. However it is more common for rally events to be decided by how well you do at average speeds of around 100 km/h. At that speed range, the main factor is cornering performance. Under WRC regulations, the SX4, due to its short body length, has a 30mm-narrower tread compared to its rivals. We can make use of the SX4’s compactness to clock better times through corners, which should make us fully competitive against our rivals in overall time, too.
Body
The regulations specify a minimum weight limit of 320 kilograms for the body shell (body in white) with safety features added. Our car has large reinforcing sections in its production version, so we have a lot of weight to cut to get it down near the minimum weight figure. Regulations don’t allow much in the way of changing materials and reducing thickness, so we look for parts we can remove, like unnecessary brackets, etc. Then we take the remaining, definitely necessary sections and build the body shell, welding and assembling the component pipes in a manner prescribed by safety, strength and rigidity concerns.
Our body-shell construction starts with the roll cage, as it is mostly pipes and plays a major factor in maintaining safety and rigidity and keeping our machine as close as possible to the minimum weight limit.
The SX4 engine is naturally aspirated with 4 cylinders and 2-liter displacement in its production form. We add a regulation turbocharger, change bore and stroke, and tune the engine to deliver lots of torque from the lowest rpm and maintain a flat torque curve through high rpm. The turbocharger naturally takes in more air as its rotating speed increases; however, the air-intake volume is restricted by regulations, so when it exceeds a certain rotating speed, negative pressure sets in and cuts down the intake air flow. The most important requirement for a World Rally Car engine is to bring out as much torque as possible before the onset of negative pressure.
World Rally Cars can also be converted to 4-wheel-drive. Specifically, the regulations allow us to make cut-outs on the floor panel to make room for a 4WD gear box, cut-outs on the partitioning wall between the engine and chassis, and tunneling cuts-outs on the floor for the propeller shaft. The regulations also permit big changes in space layouts to make room for 4WD differential arrangements which is different from a conventional front-wheel-drive layout. Also because of the rear differential, the regulations permit extensive modifications related to the allowed use of strut-type rear suspension.
In short, the SX4 WRC is based on a front-engine, four-wheel-drive vehicle and fitted with specially prepared gear box, propeller shaft and differential systems incorporating modifications allowed under WRC regulations
Every maker and team is working busy at their wind-tunnel testing facilities to streamline their vehicles’ aerodynamic performance. Demand for aerodynamic-performance upgrades come in various forms. Not often mentioned, however, is the cooling aspect. The objective is to boost cooling performance efficiently, that is, you need to improve cooling performance while also making sure the design generates good downforce, that is, preparing front and rear aerodynamic devices to create air flow that keeps the vehicle pushed down and well-connected to the ground as much as possible. The requirements for cooling, downforce, front/rear balance, all have to be satisfied while also keeping a low drag as possible. Since aerodynamic designing involves all such demands, we spend lots of time at wind-tunnel-testing facilities in our search for the most effective machine shape and aerodynamic devices.
With competition machines, the first step, determining basic specifications such as vehicle layout and performance potential, is of extreme importance. Make errors at this stage and we get bogged down with problems later on. And so we specified for the highest possible, ideal performance figures within the modifications allowed under WRC regulations. We are at the stage of considering whether our car can really function properly at such specifications, looking for possible errors in our performance estimates. As soon as we have those cleared, we’re on to the next phase, checking the car’s durability, whether it can withstand the rigors of competitions intact. That plus maintenance issues, serviceability in actual rally conditions. WRC events comprise three days of tough running across huge distances that have to be run with only little allotted servicing time. If anything breaks, it is of paramount importance that it can be properly replaced, maintained or repaired in short time. This needs to be checked very carefully, and we are also working on that right now. It’s still the early stages of development, so all our work is still done in Japan. We’ll continue testing in Japan, much of it at Suzuki test courses, until we feel that it’s shaped up to be ready to be tried out by European drivers.
We hope to be ready to go to Europe sometime before the end of year or the start of next year, and begin in earnest the job of tuning the car to winning specs. Until then, we’ll be busy in Japan looking for any potential problems, taking care of them.
We also have a surprise announcement – though it will probably be officially announced by the time this interview is uploaded. Michel Nandan, as technical manager, and Nino Frison, as chief designer, have joined our team.
We regard Michel-san as the European engineer most qualified to help us in moving forward with our WRC project. He has had lots of success in various teams including Toyota and Peugeot, and we are certain his rich rally experience will greatly add to our team performance. There is simply no one more fit for the task than him. He and I have good chemistry; he’s a great character, a person driven to winning, someone who has much experience and lots of fresh ideas. And since we have many suppliers in France, we are also counting on him to represent us and improve our communication in Europe. We also look forward to his help in communicating with FIA, as the FIA headquarters is also located in France, in Paris.
Nino-san also has rich experience, in a whole range of top competition categories including WRC, F1 and DTM. We are particularly impressed with his machine-building expertise. I remember there was a time when we used to think of working skills like welding and processing techniques to be a strongpoint of us Japanese. Together with his construction expertise, we will surely be valuing his advice in selecting methods for getting the best results within FIA regulations, as he has an intricate understanding of WRC. We asked Nino-san to join because we believe his experience and expertise will be indispensable in making our new World Rally Car construction a success.
With the team capability now greatly boosted with the joining of Michel-san and Nino-san, we are keen to develop the SX4 WRC into the world’s best WRC machine in the near future. With our experience coupled with their experience, I have no doubt we will be able to make our car the most competitive on the field. Towards that goal, we’d like them to join us in working hard, and in keeping our spirits and fitness high to endure such hard work.
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| Friday, 4-Jul-2008 07:55 |
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Suzuki Swift - Photos
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| Friday, 4-Jul-2008 07:49 |
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Suzuki Swift Sport 2008 - Episode II
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