Thursday, November 12, 2015

2013 SUPER GT Nissan GT-R GT3 - Freescale Racing Program in Japan

We kicked off the year with the Car Electronics show in January with our race-winning 2012 Porsche 911 GT3 Cup car.


After a hugely successful 2012 which yielded Freescale Japan an incredible ROI in direct new business of selling cold, hard, real microchips and sensors, we elevated the program to SUPER GT GT300 for 2013.

Here's a quick overview of the OGT! Racing program.


Our sponsor-base increased - Freescale, Marubun, Avnet EM, Toyotsu Electronics, and Tokyo Electron Device and we alternated the main sponsor branded between all of our sponsors on a per-race basis based on race location and sponsor customer bases geographically.





Partnering with apr Racing Team, we became the first team in Japanese GT history to field both a Nissan and a Toyota, as our sister car became the Toyota Prius Hybrid - an interesting racecar with a body of a Prius powered by what is essentially an IndyCar engine in the middle of the chassis.







The SUPER GT GT300 Toyota Prius GT Hybrid and Nissan GT-R GT3 NISMO from the top.



We expanded on all fronts, including a series sponsorship of the SUPER GT racing series itself.

In September, for the Asian Le Mans series round, Freescale held a Technology Event with thousands in attendance: http://supergt.net/news/single/14497

VIP Hospitality

Our hospitality, which could hold up to 80 people per day in 2012, was expanded to accommodate over 120 people per day.

As a result, we hosted nearly 1,100 people and over 700 Freescale customers over the year. Executives from companies like Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Keihin, Denso, Mitsubishi Electric, Toshiba, Hitachi, NEC, Alps, Panasonic were a common sight.



Research and Development

The video is in Japanese but is relatively self-explanatory. The end-result near the end of the video is pretty interesting.


The active safety R&D program that we initiated in 2012 became the benchmark for direction for our competition, as became clear in the trade shows in subsequent years.

In 2012 Car Electronics Show in Tokyo, Freescale Japan was the only company in the space promoting its active safety-focused R&D program in our race car.
In 2013, I noticed a few other competitors showing similar technologies on small RC cars and such.

In the 2014 show, nearly every single microchip company on the floor had taken the theme we developed!

Racing



Here's an onboard video from the Suzuka test with our Freescale OGT! Racing #30 NISSAN GT-R GT3 NISMO car:


Media

The media coverage also grew with the R&D program getting picked up in over 20 newspaper articles and hundreds of locations online.


Our press conferences were always packed:



The mega Designing with Freescale event we hosted during the Asian Le Mans series race at Fuji Speedway was fantastic - pairing motorsports, R&D, and freescale seminars for our customer engineers, with tons of activities for the entire family to enjoy.


The Corporate Holiday Greeting video for Freescale Korea & Japan




The OGT! Racing (One Great Team!) facebook page has all the content that was continuously updated throughout the 2 years of the program. I really recommend you check it out - many more photos, videos, and overall information: https://www.facebook.com/ogtracing