Dome F105

Dome was founded in 1975 by brothers Minoru and Shoichi Hayashi, who had built their first racing car ten years earlier. In 1980 the company built its first Formula Three car, and the Hayashi Racing team won the All-Japan Formula Three Championship in 1981 using its own 320 chassis. Dome first entered the Japanese Formula 3000 series in 1987, using a March chassis, but had plans to build its own chassis. Hayashi established a separate company, Jiotto Design, as a design department for Dome. As a result of this progress, Marco Apicella won the 1994 championship driving the Dome F104 chassis equipped with a Mugen Honda engine. Jiotto's facilities included a 25 per cent wind tunnel, computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing equipment, and several autoclaves: all of which could be used to design and construct a more complicated Formula One car. In 1995, the former team manager of the Minardi Formula One team, Tadashi Sasaki, joined Dome. Dome has denied that this was the case, insisting that it was an independent effort. The F105 was, like any Formula One car of its time, constructed around a carbon-fibre monocoque. The F105 was liveried in traditional Japanese white with a fluorescent yellow stripe around the cockpit and engine cover, and had minimal sponsorship. The car was completed on March 17, 1996. ==Testing==

The F105 was launched at the Spiral building in Tokyo on March 18, 1996. Marco Apicella, who had won the 1994 Japanese Formula 3000 championship with Dome, and local drivers Naoki Hattori and Shinji Nakano were selected as the project's test drivers. Apicella and Hattori both had brief experience of competing in F1, whilst Nakano was a Honda protégé who was driving for Dome in F3000. The F105 was tested for the first time at the Japanese Mine circuit in the spring of 1996, driven by Nakano, before the programme moved to Suzuka in the hands of Apicella. By April, the F105 had completed and its engine was replaced with a new one. The car reached the mark in May, by which time a baseline setup had been established. Dome planned to establish a European test base during the summer of 1996 and run at several European circuits on the calendar of the 1996 Formula One season, but this plan never came to fruition due to a shortage of funding. The team did, however, test at Suzuka shortly after the season-ending 1996 Japanese Grand Prix at the circuit. Hattori set a best time of 1:46.270, which was more than seven seconds slower than Jacques Villeneuve's pole position time of 1:38.909 set in the Williams FW18 chassis. It was also 0.3 seconds slower than the 107% cut-off mark for qualification, although journalist Sam Collins speculates that a faster time could have been set with a top-line driver. The 1998 season also saw changes to the sport's technical regulations which rendered the F105 obsolete. In 1999, Sasaki entered negotiations with a Dutch company and plans were made to put the ageing F105 through another testing programme before building a revised F106 chassis, but the company insisted that the chassis be equipped with a Honda engine. At this point, Honda was in the process of evaluating a full-scale return to the sport with the test Honda RA099 chassis, and ultimately through the supply of works engines to the British American Racing team for the 2000 season, and was unwilling to supply a new customer team in addition to these commitments. As a result, Dome definitively abandoned its Formula One ambitions and has concentrated on the Japanese racing scene and sports car racing in the 21st century. The sole F105 chassis, still fitted with its Mugen engine, is currently stored underneath the wind tunnel at Dome's headquarters in Maibara. ==Video games==

Two sim racing video games based on the project was released for the PlayStation: • Dōmu no Yabō: F1 GP NIPPON no Chōsen (1996) • Dōmu no Yabō 2: The Race of Champions (1998) One game for PC released on Steam: • Automobilista 2 (2020) ==References==