The Untold Story of Hayabusa Racing, Part 2 – Returning to Japan

After tasting an unprecedented defeat and returning to Japan (you can read about that episode [here]), I spent the next few months reflecting.

Even though we had lost, a part of me thought, maybe I could spend another year working with the team from Fukui.

But then, thanks to a string of coincidences—or maybe something more—Hayabusa Racing was born.

Doubts

The biggest challenge was simply whether this whole idea was even possible.

It wasn’t like I had any friends who loved F1 enough to jump into a crazy project like this.

In Japan, there wasn’t a single example of someone just starting an F1 in Schools team out of nowhere.

And unlike more established competitions like "Robocon," "Business Contest," or "Rocket Koshien," I had no idea how to even begin gathering the money we’d need.

Right after my trip to the World Finals in Singapore, I left for a short-term study program in China.

Luckily—or maybe unluckily—in China, I couldn't really get in touch with anyone from Japan.

Which meant I had plenty of time to just sit and think.

One day, flipping through photos from Singapore, I found myself getting weirdly frustrated.

All I had were pictures of sightseeing spots, like I was just some tourist.

Maybe it was that frustration, or maybe it was just my old, stubborn pride overpowering my "logical" side,

but somewhere along the way, a fire lit inside me:

I absolutely wanted to be the best in the world.

When I got back, I asked my school if I could start a new team.

The answer?

Shot down immediately by my homeroom teacher.

Just like that, the dream turned to dust.

The Beginning

The story I tell sponsors when they ask how it all started goes something like this:

I happened to meet Mori at cram school.

Out of curiosity, I glanced at the background image on his iPad—there it was, a Ferrari F1 car.

Right then and there, I asked him if he wanted to join me for this crazy competition.

It sounds like pure chance—and it was—but honestly, a lot of little "inevitable coincidences" had piled up before that.

Because I had spent a month in China after Singapore, I had completely missed the cram school's summer session.

When I came back, my grades were wrecked, and I got dropped down one class.

And it was that very next semester that Mori joined.

That’s how we met.

At first, all I did was send Mori a quick message introducing the competition.

No reply.

I figured I probably came on too strong for someone I had just met.

But then—two weeks later—out of nowhere, Mori sent me a message saying,

“I’ve gathered some members.”

And just like that, a brand-new Tokyo-based F1 in Schools team was born.

The First Step

Naturally, since I had the most experience, I just assumed I would handle the engineering side of things.I handed out the official regulations, and a month later, our first car was already finished.

Meanwhile, I had taken three months to build my first car.Clearly, it was smarter to leave car-building to the geniuses from Kaisei High School.

If you dig through our very first posts on X (Twitter) or Instagram, you’ll find this strange rendering we made our team’s motif.

F1 in Schools 車体　第一号

We had no experience raising funds.

None of us had ever even tried anything like this before.

But our dream was simple:

Join the competition, somehow scrape together the funding, and engineer the world’s fastest car.

Somewhere deep down, I guess I believed—

If it’s about making things, Japan’s gotta be the best, right?

And so, our clumsy, reckless adventure toward becoming world champions had begun…