[Interview] The privateer team taking the fight to Super Formula's big guns
An in-depth discussion with Dandelion Racing team principal Kiyoshi Muraoka as team prepares to fight for first Super Formula title since 2020... (Photos: JRP, Honda)
This story was originally published on Monday November 4 as a paywalled article, but is now free to read for everyone to celebrate Dandelion Racing’s teams’ title success. Enjoy!
The story of the Super Formula season so far - and, indeed, the SF23 era - has been about three teams. There’s Team Mugen, which is the closest thing Honda has to a factory team. There’s also TOM’S, which performs a similar function for Toyota, albeit without the advantage of assembling the marque’s engines. And then there’s Dandelion Racing, which, quite frankly, is an organisation that should have no business fighting the other two.
Compared with its two main rivals, Dandelion is a tiny operation, with around only 25 staff. While Mugen, part of the larger M-TEC empire, and TOM’S both compete in multiple series, with head counts running into the hundreds, Dandelion more or exists solely to win in Super Formula. And for a team of relatively modest means, it has had its fair share of successes over the years since it first entered Formula Nippon in 1999.
It took Dandelion four years to win its first race and its fifth season yielded its first championship title with Richard Lyons in 2004. After Lyons’ departure the following year, the team entered a slump before returning to form to win the teams’ title in 2012. After a few fallow years, a second teams’ title would follow in 2019 before Naoki Yamamoto led the team to its second drivers’ title, a full 16 years on from the first.
This time, it looks like the wait for a third drivers’ crown might not be quite so long, as Tadasuke Makino goes into this weekend’s Suzuka double-header finale with a shot at the title, albeit with a 14.5-point deficit to make up to TOM’S driver Sho Tsuboi.
Given Dandelion’s strength this season, it’s almost easy to forget that the Kyoto-based team got off to a slow start in the SF23 era, only really turning around its fortunes in the in-season test at Fuji. It was too late to save Makino’s title bid, but that late-season form set the squad up perfectly for the start of 2024, and after a bruising opener in a rather anomalous opener at Suzuka, Makino opened his account with a win at Autopolis and hasn’t looked back.
In fact, team principal Kiyoshi Muraoka (pictured above with Makino) believes the fact Dandelion struggled initially with the SF23 compared to other teams ended up being something of a blessing in disguise, allowing the team to focus more energy on preparing for the looming damper rule changes - not only the switch to standard Ohlins products, but also the loss of the third damper.
“This year we had the change to common dampers, and so we were unable to keep using our own original dampers,” says Muraoka. “Other teams used to just buy them off the shelf, but for us it was quite an abrupt change. But we knew about the change quite early and because we were having trouble last year with the SF23 at the start of the season, we decided we would start preparing [for the common dampers] from an early stage.
“I think the data we had from last year’s Fuji round onwards allowed us to go into this season and not have any issues. Some people might have thought that because Dandelion made its own dampers, we would be the team most disadvantaged by the change, but the fact it became a positive for us is because we were so slow to get going with the SF23.”
For the second year in a row, Dandelion has run the all-Kansai duo of Makino and Kakunoshin Ohta, who scored his first win in last year’s Suzuka finale as a rookie but hasn’t been able to feature in this year’s title battle some bad luck (most memorably the throttle issue that caused him to spin out of the lead at Motegi while battling with Makino).
It’s the first time that Dandelion has gone into a new season with the same drivers since 2020, which Muraoka feels has also been instrumental in its return to the front of the field. But equally, with Honda making the decisions on this front, he admits that guaranteeing the team’s competitiveness year to year is difficult.
“The aim has always been to have two cars capable of winning, but the problem has been the driver of the #6 car has often changed in recent times,” he says. “It’s a matter of timing. We are not in the position to be able to make our own choices regarding drivers. Our role is largely to help bring up Honda’s young drivers.
“There have been many cases of drivers coming to us and then racing elsewhere, and newcomers coming in. Honda has to consider everything from a global perspective, including the wishes of the drivers themselves.”
Yamamoto was Dandelion’s last champion in 2020
While hopeful of being able to keep both Makino and Ohta in 2025, Muraoka recognises that either could be called upon to move teams by Honda, especially with the likes of Tomoki Nojiri and Yamamoto now likely in their final few years. But he equally understands the value for Honda of having a competitive training ground for its youngsters.
“In recent years, M-TEC [Mugen] and Nakajima Racing are the teams within Honda that get to use the same drivers for years repeatedly, but from time to time they need drivers who can be relied upon to deliver immediately,” Muraoka explains. “Honda and Toyota both need that kind of team, especially if something happens to their top teams.
“To have three teams for driver training who finish 9th, 10th and 11th in the [teams’] rankings isn’t good for Honda. To have a team that is always able to get a junior driver in the top three, or at worst in the top five, is an important thing for them to have.”
While Dandelion is these days firmly part of the Honda ecosphere, the team was in a very different situation in its early years after Muraoka securing the blessing of long-time backer NTT Docomo to enter Formula Nippon, initially with a single car, following the demise of the Japanese Touring Car Championship (where the team had been racing, without much success, since 1995 after two seasons of All-Japan Formula 3 in 1993-94).
It took until the 2002 season for Dandelion to score a point, with the arrival of Lyons three races into that season heralding an upturn in fortunes. And while it would be Lyons that took the team’s first title two years later, Muraoka is also keen to credit 2003 signing Naoki Hattori for the improvements that eventually led to Dandelion’s breakthrough season in 2004.
“We had a lot of difficulties in the early years, but things got better when we had Richard Lyons and Naoki Hattori,” reflects Muraoka. “At first we had Richard competing for us in a one-car team [in 2002], but then after discussing things with our sponsors, we decided to add a second car and really aim for the title. We signed Hattori because the strength of our team was still not good enough at the time and we needed someone who could build up the team as well as drive quickly. So he became a driver-cum-team advisor for us.
“Of course Richard did a great job [winning the title in 2004] but it was also down to Hattori-san’s contribution. For example, when we got the first pole and win at Suzuka in 2003 [with Lyons], Hattori-san advised us to focus on a couple of key areas. I have really great memories of those two drivers working together.”
Dandelion became a Honda engine user in 2006 as Formula Nippon entered the current era of engine competition. In 2009, the team was handed the responsibility of looking after Honda-contracted youngster Takuya Izawa (pictured above in 2013), and that status was further cemented when Koudai Tsukakoshi was placed with the team in 2011, at the expense of no lesser driver than 2009 series champion Loic Duval.
“In the early days, we struggled to attract top Japanese drivers,” admits Muraoka. “It was almost like they would prefer not to race at all than drive for us! That’s one of the reasons we had a lot of foreign drivers around that time, even after Richard. The team was also calling on engineers from Europe around this time through our connections with Lola, and that knowledge also helped us become stronger. We became a kind of entry point for people coming from Japan to Europe. Because we were just a privateer team, with no manufacturer support, that was the way we could increase our level to take on Japan’s top teams.
“Once we became a top team, our relationship with Honda became stronger and that led us to the position we are in now [running Honda-contracted drivers]. The irony is that, partly as a result of having a lot of foreign drivers in the past, lately we haven’t had any!”
Stoffel Vandoorne was the last non-Japanese driver to race for Dandelion in 2016
Dandelion is unique among Super Formula’s teams in being the only one based in Japan’s Kansai region, with its factory located in the city of Kameoka near Kyoto - a long way from its rivals, most of which are based in Japan’s answer to ‘carbon fibre valley’ around Gotemba.
That means that the team doesn’t attract a huge amount of new personnel. But equally it fosters a strong sense of loyalty among the personnel it does recruit, with several key pillars, including team director/engineer Norimitsu Yoshida and team manager Tetsuya Hamada, having been around for a long time.
“It is more difficult to attract staff,” says Muraoka. “But we attract people who are confident in their own skills, who perhaps don’t fit in another organisation because of their personality or because they are unable to do the things they really want to do.
“As a result, our members haven’t changed much over the years. We don’t get much in terms of outside information, but at the same time, our secrets don’t leak to other teams. So there are advantages and disadvantages, and I think they more or less cancel each other out.”
There are not many teams either that are dedicated solely to Super Formula. Besides Dandelion, the only other organisation that doesn’t currently compete in any other category is Ryuji Doi’s DTM outfit that operates the KCMG team (although the Hong Kong company is involved in other forms of racing outside of Japan).
“Of course we are using Honda engines and Honda-contracted drivers, but as an organisation, we exist only to win in Super Formula,” highlights Muraoka. “That is our only purpose, which gives us a kind of purity I think other teams don’t have.”
Does Dandelion have any ambitions to expand into SUPER GT? Muraoka says not, which is largely because its current backers have shown no particular inclination in that direction.
“In SUPER GT, you basically need to be a manufacturer team to race in GT500,” says Muraoka. “If we were to do SUPER GT, it would be in GT500 because we want to fight at the top, just like we do in Super Formula. We are not interested in GT300.
“At the moment, our sponsors haven’t indicated a strong wish to do SUPER GT, and we don’t want to chase after different sponsors in case we upset our existing partners. It might seem like an alien concept to foreigners, but we definitely won’t do anything that would go against the interests of the sponsors that have helped us up to now.”
It means the plan, says Muraoka, is for Dandelion to continue in much the same vein it has done until now. And even if Honda sets the agenda for the team’s drivers, it’s clear that his desire to fly the flag for the independents still burns strong even after 25 years.
“In other series like F1, you have to be a manufacturer team or have a close alliance with a manufacturer team to have a chance to win,” says Muraoka. “What we are trying to demonstrate is that privateer teams can still do great things, like in the old days.
“I think if a team like ours didn’t exist any more, the championship would be less interesting.”