Winds of change comming to Toyota

[WhiteBlue]

grandprix.com published the following:

A revolution coming at Toyota?

The word from Japan is that the Toyota Motor Company is about to announce a massive restructuring, following the loss of $7.7bn in the first quarter of the year. It is said that 40% of the senior management of the company will be dropped when new chief executive Akio Toyoda takes control on June 1. He will be the first member of the firm's founding family to have the top job for 14 years, but will be the sixth to hold that position. It is felt within the family that the company has drifted away from its traditional values in the last few years and the change in management is designed to alter the way of thinking within the empire. There are 30 members of the Toyota board of directors, but more than half of them are over 60. Tadashi Yamashina, the head of the motorsport division, is on the board but is one of the younger generation at 57. He says that he has the support of Toyoda for the company to continue in F1 but he admits that things could change given the current state of the automobile markets of the world. Things will become clearer after Toyoda takes control

If Toyota is focussing on the traditional values and decide to stay in F1 they will do the usual thing. Cut out muda. What is Muda in motor sport? In my view it is the management by check book that Toyota has done in F1 for 10 years. They will probably do things more direct and go for efficiency and synergy . At least that would be the logical thing to do.

Primo they should put a person of authority from Japan in charge of motor sport activities in Europe. Then integrate the F1 factory in Cologne with their top research facilities in Japan. What is the point of doing cutting edge technology in F1 if it is not getting the latest inputs from corporate research and feeds back to R&D in Japan.

[Conceptual]

Anyone else see the irony in the Toyota/Toyoda matchup?

I'd integrate Cologne with Japan all right, we'd be stamping chassis out of UV cured prepreg Vectran, and epoxying the car together, and coating it in Rhino lining.

I'd make the average Toyota produced at the factory above F1 technology.

Buy, my name doesn't sound like Toyota, so I don't have a chance!

[mx_tifoso]

Toyota article in Wikipedia:

Vehicles were originally sold under the name "Toyoda" (トヨダ), from the family name of the company's founder, Kiichiro Toyoda. In September 1936, the company ran a public competition to design a new logo. Out of 27,000 entries the winning entry was the three Japanese katakana letters for "Toyoda" in a circle. But Risaburo Toyoda, who had married into the family and was not born with that name, preferred "Toyota" (トヨタ) because it took eight brush strokes (a fortuitous number) to write in Japanese, was visually simpler (leaving off two ticks at the end) and with a voiceless consonant instead of a voiced one (voiced consonant is considered "murky" or "muddy" sound compared to the voiceless consonant, which is "clear"). Since "Toyoda" literally means "fertile rice paddies", changing the name also helped to distance the company from associations with old fashioned farming. The newly formed word was trademarked and the company was registered in August 1937 as the "Toyota Motor Company".

[gridwalker]

It's also a phoenetic translation, in much the same way that "taoism" is pronounced as "daoism" ...

Toyota desperately need to trim some of the fat in their operation, as they are surely the best example of high budgets not buying success on track. Given their unfulfilled potential this season, I can understand why their management would see the team as an underperforming expense.

It'll be very interesting to see what changes get implemented, should the team remain in formula one.