THYREN wrote:
It is. And I am actually surprised (disappointed?
) it's being developped in the US and not in Japan.
The Japanese are, for all their greatness, not pioneers. What the Japanese are greatest at is taking an existing idea and making it work to absolute perfection. America first mass produced cars, but the people who do it best are the Japanese. The Motorcycle was invented inthe Europe, but the Japanese make the best performing and most reliable motorcycles in the world right from scooters up to 200bhp sports bikes.
I am a massive motorcycle racing fan, and it's pretty hard to be one without noticing the Japanese at work. The MotoGP championship is basically Formula 1 for bikes, no holes barred prototype performance motorcycle racing. I'll use this as a case study. You have prior permission to call me a nerd. I know I am
The Honda 'factory' team is staffed mostly by Japanese engineers, managers and mechanics. It's heavily controlled by HRC (Honda Racing Corporation). They have in recent years performed very poorly. The fact they won the championship in 2006 was down to Nicky Hayden riding a bike that didn't always want to work to the absolute limit race after race, and in fact he only won 2 races all season. Some spanish staff are employed, and the riders are American and Spanish respectively, with a smattering of other trusted non-Japanese personel, but not many. The Japanese hold all the keys and make a most of the decisions. Bikes are designed at HRC in Japan based on test data, and tested by a Japanese rider before being used in race conditions. The whole thing is too Japanese...
Yamaha's factory team is staffed by a mix of european and Japanese staff, it's overseen jointly by British manager Lyn Jarvis and Japanese executive Masao Furusawa (both of whom I have enormous respect for). Yamaha have won the Championship with Valentino Rossi (Italian) and his crew chief and mentor Jeremy Burgess (an Aussie) and this team setup twice (2004 and 2005) , and this season after 2 patchy seasons they look stronger than ever, grabbing all 3 podium positions at the last race in France, and having a rider on every podium so far this season. They essentially have the perfect mix and match combination of Japanese and non-Japanese staff, so when the Japanese guys run out of ideas the other guys can come up with some weird and wonderful suggestions.
Ducati are almost entirely Italian (as you'd expect) and like most things that italians do they are great when it all goes well and not very great when it all falls apart. With very few Japanese staff (they have some from tyre supplier Bridgestone, and no others for the most part) they tend to be very erratic. Last season they were the top dog, blowing away everyone else and winning the championship by a mile. This season with the same lead rider, Casey Stoner (don't laugh that really is his surname, and he's an Aussie, of course), they are struggling like hell.
So what's my point?
The Japanese cannot create great things on their own. They need some off-the-wall, backwards thinking folk to contribute some much-needed flare into the process. If you look at everything the Japanese excel at you'll probably find someone else did it first, but the Japanese did ti better.
That's my 2 cents/pence/yen worth.
I'm sure everyone remembers the guy in the armed suit in SAC1 that nearly tore the Major apart. That's the sort of thing the US military are aiming at, eventually. You'll be unsurprised to know a large slice of the funding it coming from DARPA, the US military research agency.
