Taking a backwards look at the sport is always good fun. So when I was offered a chance to publish an article written by Andrew Luu, I jumped at it.

Andrew was the youngest journalist on the AutoWeek payroll, and the first Canadian to join them. He has since moved on, but the article that follows was written in 2005 following his interview with Taku, and it makes good reading.

You may spot a little bias in Andrew's writing, he is a long-standing Taku fan and writes proudly of his achievements. I hope to be able to publish more of his writing, so watch this space. Meanwhile, enjoy this retrospective look at was what to become a horrible season ...

Editor’s Note: This story is being published as it was originally written back in February 2005. I was commissioned to produce this article for a magazine that went under just before the start of the season, and so it went unpublished. However with the recent success of Sato and Super Aguri, I felt it was a story still worth sharing.  

Racing for Respect

He’s talented, he’s fast and he’s also Japanese

BY ANDREW LUU

Dark clouds shadow the Pembrey racing circuit in Wales as pre-race testing commences for the 1999 British Formula Three season. The Carlin Motorsport team is present and Anthony Hieatt, the team’s chief race engineer, watches from the circuit’s sidelines. His eyes are fixated onto Honda Curve. Something has caught his attention.  

“It’s a fifth gear corner, minimum speed is about 120 mph and the test day was wet. We spend a lot of time testing there so we know the circuit very well,” says Hieatt. “All of a sudden there was this car that was getting into some incredible oversteer and getting away with it. We didn’t know who it was and we find out it was a Japanese lad.”

Less than a week before the final grand prix of the 2003 Formula One season in Japan, the British American Racing (BAR)-Honda team announced that it no longer required the services of 1997 world champion Jacques Villeneuve. For 2004, the seat belonged to the Japanese lad, Takuma Sato.

The news was immediately met by many critics who disagreed with BAR’s decision to promote its then current test-driver in favor of a former champ and history seems to side with them. In F1’s 57-year history Honda engines have won five championships, yet prior to Sato, only one Japanese driver has finished on the podium (third by Aguri Suzuki at the 1990 Japanese G.P.). Only five have ever scored points. Sato’s ’02 rookie campaign with Jordan is cited mostly for the off-track excursions, though only two incidents were his fault.

It certainly didn’t help matters that most of his predecessors were not just erratic, but also wealthy ‘paying-drivers’ whose deep pockets–not merit–powered their way onto the grid. With the stereotypes firmly in place, it was easy to label Sato as simply another “typical” Japanese driver. However, a look into his past tells a vastly different story.

At the age of 10, when most of today’s drivers spent their childhood days running laps in karts, Sato sat glued to the television as his hero Ayrton Senna, humbled the competition in a Lotus-Honda. “I have dreamed about being a racer ever since I was a small boy, it was always my goal,” says Sato. “But my parents knew nothing about motor racing and none of my friends raced karts so there was no chance.”

Neither could his parents afford to pursue the sport, so he took to the most affordable avenue: he raced bicycles. Sato quickly showed his innate aptitude for speed; by age 18 and many championships later he was one of Japan’s best. So good was Sato, that competing in the Tour de France became a real ambition. Even with success on two-wheels calling out his name, it failed to subdue his pursuit of Formula One.

One day while reading a magazine, Sato noticed an ad for the Honda Suzuka Scholarship School, a program like the Red Bull Driver Search in the United States.

“I went to the Suzuka racing school when I was 20, but it was my last chance because the age limit was just 20. The school was great for me because they gave me a chance to learn about racing and if you get the scholarship, you have a true chance of proving yourself in real racing.”

With the money he earned from racing bicycles, he bought himself a second-hand kart and enrolled in the school. Without a single motor race to his name, Sato graduated at the top of his class in 1997 and with it came that chance: a fully funded drive in the All-Japan Formula Three championship. So what does a guy with no money and no experience do? He turned the offer down.

“Firstly, I had to learn English. Not reading and writing, the real survival of English,” he explains. “And of course I realized early that all successful drivers spend most of their time in Europe. That is what Senna did and many others did and it worked for them. So I thought it was the best way to make it if you want to get to F1.”

Success followed him to Europe with impressive runs in Formula Vauxhall, the Opel Euroseries and of course the Pembrey rain. Not long after Hieatt spotted the sideways spectacle at Pembrey, Carlin signed Sato for the 2000 British F3 season.

With Carlin in only its third full F3 season and a rookie Sato behind the wheel, the team managed five wins to finish third overall. The next season produced the championship, with Sato taking home a record 12 wins (six more than runner-up Anthony Davidson).

He also took victories at the Masters of F3 at Zandvoort in Germany and most notably the Macau Grand Prix where the world’s top junior formula talent gathers to compete each year. “[Michael] Schumacher won it, [David] Coulthard won it,” says Hieatt. “It’s an incredibly demanding track and in F3 if there’s one race you’re gonna win it’s Macau.”

His accomplishments earned him a ride with the Jordan F1 squad in 2002. Five years after jumping off his bicycle, he was in Formula One.

After a tough rookie campaign with the uncompetitive and cash-strapped Jordan, Sato was let go in favor of a sponsor-backed driver and took over testing duties for BAR-Honda in 2003. After Villeneuve learned Sato would replace him for 2004, he opted not to race less than four days before the season finale in Japan. Sato stepped in after a year’s absence and finished a brilliant sixth. 

In 2004 the drama continued. The first half of the season was hindered by five engine failures in just seven races—his teammate suffered one all year. A modern F1 car is nearly impossible to abuse with all its electronic safeguards, however people accused him of overdriving the car—a claim the team publicly denied. In contrast Kimi Raikkonen also detonated several Mercedes-Benz engines yet no one ever implied that he was to blame.

In the same light, his overtaking attempt on Ferrari driver Rubens Barrichello for second place at the European Grand Prix, which ended in Sato having to replace his front wing, was called reckless. Barrichello identified it as “amateurish.” 

Later in the season at the Japanese G.P., Barrichello’s similar, but race ending attempt (for both) on Coulthard at Suzuka was excused as a “racing incident.”

Despite the critics, Taku’s (as his friends call him) hard charging approach has won him a legion of fans in a sport that too often has been dubbed ‘boring’ due to the lack of passing.

An inspired charge after a botched pit strategy from eleventh to his first podium, a third at the United States G.P., solidified the potential Sato has shown all along. While his teammate Jenson Button finished third overall and Sato finished eighth in ‘04, former BAR-Honda boss David Richards remembers Button had five year under his belt to Sato’s lone season in ’02.

“The fact that Taku has such little racing experience is often forgotten and that is why I personally have great confidence in his ability to continue the progress he has already shown,” says Richards. “It is quite remarkable that he is competing on equal level with people around him who have grown up since the age of 8 in go-karts.

“The interesting point about Takuma is his ability to learn and his extra-ordinary work ethic which will stand him in very good stead in an era where talent alone is not enough to succeed.”

Hieatt, who has worked with such drivers as two-time F1 champion Mika Hakkinen, Barrichello, Raikkonen and Button, says Carlin’s success is largely credit to Sato’s unrelenting determination.

“Taku will work non-stop, he doesn’t rest. He carries on right throughout the day looking at the data to find everything he can. He doesn’t relax. He’s a bit like [Michael] Schumacher in that respect. He is a team gatherer and gets people on his side, and will spend as much time as necessary to get the car in the right direction. I’ve never met a driver that works as hard as he does.”

Nevertheless, being Japanese and having graduated from Honda’s racing school, Sato still faces allegations of favoritism from the manufacturer, when in fact the two have no personal contract—he drives a Mini Cooper.

“Honda have helped me in the past, but I do not just do what they say,” says Sato. “I want to win and Honda wants to win. If we can do that together then great, but my aim is to win with whatever engine or team I am with.” 

Richards too has been accused of buckling to pressure from Honda, a claim he adamantly dismisses. “Whatever people might say regarding the Honda link, given the expectations of myself and our objectives as an organization, there is no way I would jeopardize 50 percent of our races by putting someone in the race seat that I didn’t feel was capable of delivering.”

This perception also puts the Japanese star at a distinct disadvantage because he must “shake off this perception that he is only in the team because of Honda and as a result he has to try even harder than another driver without this stigma attached to them.”

Hieatt believes this stigma attached to his nationality has caused people to ignore and overlook his remarkable accomplishments. “If he was English or German then goodness me he’d be the David Beckham of England. Coulthard or Button wouldn’t be getting all the publicity. People like that just don’t know the real story.”

Unfortunately the real story is Taku must prove himself amidst the world’s best drivers as much as he is not just another one of those “Japanese” racers that history paints so inadequate.

For the normally reserved Japanese, they know this Rising Son represents their loudest voice yet and not only do the expectations of a team fall his shoulders, but the hopes of a culture waiting for its first truly international hero.   

While he outwardly conceals the burden with his trademark youthful smile, he enters 2005 knowing it will be the most important time of his life. The car is now competitive, he’s gained the requisite experience, and both team and driver are expected to progress rapidly towards the front of the grid.

Already Japan’s most successful F1 driver, surely more podiums are in the cards, perhaps even a trip onto the top step. Impossible you say? I would have said the same thing to that kid and his bicycle eight years ago.