Its fascinating really, watching champions strut their stuff over and over in practise for their big day. It’s all so choreographed and second nature for everyone in the team. And there’s always something for everybody to do, even if it means just standing around with a broom, someone’s going to be there with a broom because sometimes things happen that require a broom. So with every detail worked out to perfection, the Honda Malaysia Racing Team practices it’s moves over and over again and it goes down to every detail to recreate the real world race day environment, even to the extent of training at night.
The last time we went over to watch them work, everybody was new, fresh faces WITH a fresh new job and zero race experience, except the drivers of course. Even that didn’t hide the professionalism in the air, and more so now, more than a month after, everybody is still smiling, reading statistics, managing some calculations, figuring out how to get the car to go faster. I dare say that the unity in the team could even surpass the Mclaren-Mercedes Formula 1 Team of 2007 with Alonso vs Hamilton and the entire spy scandal, but that’s an entirely different story.
As mentioned before, the pit crew of the HMRT consist of Honda employees working at the offices in both KL and Malacca and are not specially trained. Yet, there is a sense of calm and collectedness usually reserved for highly trained professional teams. Besides that, there is also the addition of new drivers to the 2008 line up, driving for car number 26 will be Faisal Asri and for car number 27 will be kart whiz and 2003 Malaysian Karter of the Year, Victor Cheong.
We caught up with Victor during lunch and got him to answer some questions for us. When asked what his biggest challenges were he answered, “ there’s definitely more competitors and competitive cars this time. But whatever is this; being Honda we rise to the challenge and we are prepared for it. The car is well prepared and for our part is to do our best. Victor also positively identified some personal goals for himself, among which is to be at the top of the podium and is currently working team mates Eddie Lew and Aaron Lim to achieve that target.
It’s encouraging to see how people with no race experience come together to create a professional works team on only their second outing, almost makes you feel like running your own MME race team but then again, I’m no Ron Dennis. We will be following up with their progress as the MME Endurance Race gets closer, it’ll be pretty interesting to see how a team that trains day and night fares, you’ll be sure to know.
