Ryan Maker – 12 months on is he still living the dream of being a car manufacturer?
One year ago the very likeable Australian Touring Car racer Ryan Maker revealed to the world that he was going to take the brave step of turning his very successful aftermarket RC parts company RC Maker into a full fledged car manufacturer. In doing so he was aiming to realise a childhood dream, but he didn’t just announce these plans with some CAD drawings, he turned up with a self designed first prototype under his arm to race at one of touring car racing’s biggest and toughest stages – the famous TITC in Bangkok, Thailand. Having done a feature piece on Ryan in the build up to our coverage of last year’s TITC, as part of the lead into our coverage of what is looking like being the greatest edition yet of this unique event, we caught back up with Ryan to discover, if 12-months on, he is still living the dream as the second batch of SP1 kits are currently making their way around the world to new customers. Spoiler alert, always a pleasure to chat to due his infectious passionate and positivity, he concluded our conversation with the very clear, ‘I am living my dream that’s for sure, it’s pretty damn cool.’
Opening our conversation by reminding Ryan of how he couldn’t have picked a much bigger stage to announce his grand plans to the world, everyone wanting to see this new creation from Down under, something to be fair he was happy to show them in person but understandably not wanting published online, his reaction was, ‘It was daunting to say the least’. Asking if the 12-months since have been more difficult than expected or gone to plan he replied, ‘the whole thing was just an extremely daunting process and you doubt yourself many times especially with myself working, not alone, but I have a very small team and we are doing a lot of things in-house so it took a lot of work to get to where we are now. As I said to the guys here in the container (referring to his pit area at TITC), it’s a miracle we even have these cars driving around this track today. It has been a hell of a journey but super rewarding of course now but I would say the hardest part of the whole thing was putting together a kit car and having customers that built that car get the quality they want and assemble it correctly, and kind of just making a fully consumer grade product.’
While most of us will never experience the detailed planning and preparations that go into taking a product from a concept on paper to a physical customer ready product, asked about any particular hiccups along the way he said, ‘honestly it was pretty streamlined. I tried to think of everything ahead of time, of course there are little things that come up through the process. You just adjust the kit to what the manufacturer gives you you know, we had to add some little shims here & there, point-one shims. This is just a thing in the industry, you know everything is manufactured to basically aerospace grade tolerances so if one thing is .05 or point one off we need to fix that, it’s not something that’s acceptable in this industry. We aimed to get the tolerances as good as possible and in some cases that means tweaking a thing which we done. I think we’ve progressed and overall the finished product has been great. The next batch of cars that we’ve just released, I think we’ve gone up a level again in terms of the tolerances and stuff so we are just trying to improve step by step.’
Asked if shipping the first batch of cars brought huge relief or was just the start of things, Ryan said, ‘On one end when we shipped the kits out it was the biggest relief but then 5-days after that it was the most anxiety I’ve experienced waiting for people to build up their cars and hoping they have the same experience putting their cars together as I did. With so many different parts and everything going into kits it’s scary and you basically hope the customer receives what you built yourself and what you wanted. We had mistakes in the kit packing. We do all that in-house with a really small team, my mom is helping with a lot of that as well, it’s a proper family run business and we are learning along the way. There were little hiccups with packing but overall we got it fixed fast. We had a little bit of an issue with driveshafts which we didn’t foresee. Our testing was fine but when we got into some conditions we found they weren’t up to the job so we did a driveshaft update and sent that out to our distributors and direct to customers if need be to mitigate the situation as quickly as possible. It’s all good now but it was an extremely stressful time. Obviously when you release something brand new the last thing you want is everyone to be having a problem with something so we got that fixed up as quickly as we could, we did it all for free because that was the right thing to do. It wasn’t super smooth sailing but looking back now on it it’s like just a small bump on the road and I think the performance of the car now and people’s experiences far outshone these kind of moments. It was a negative thing but I think the way we handled it we turned it into a positive. People saw the way we reacted and saw the customer service we provided and I think that brought a lot of goodwill. That sets the stage or tone for what we intend to do for the future. For me it is a long game and I not trying to just make one car and that’s it. I am thinking 5-10 years ahead of now and trying to become a reputable manufacturer that people like and people trust.’
Highlighting the SP1 must have been well received in racing circles given he has just released a second batch of kits, Ryan explained, ‘It’s been incredible. We couldn’t even sell any retail on our own website in the last batch because our distributors bought all of them. That’s not a problem I ever envisioned having especially in the second batch. The first batch maybe with the hype and everything but the second batch you never know. People buying the second batch kits are not buying on hype anymore, they are buying off performance, what their friends have experienced, what they have seen at the track. So if the car didn’t work or wasn’t good that second batch could have been a massive flop. It’s great to know people are speaking so highly of it.’
While the RC Maker parts business was already taking him away from getting out racing himself last year, Ryan is not racing at the TITC but instead is at Infinity RC Addict as a mechanic and to one very notable driver. He explains, I’m not racing this year, I told myself last year this is it for me, this first initial year with the SP1 I am going to try out this mechanic thing and just be there for the customer and our team drivers, supporting them as much as possible. With my new role, racing personally just doesn’t make sense, I mean I have got guys like (Atsushi) Hara and Antoine (Brunet) and Jeff (Hamon) and they are every bit better than me so it’s like why would I concern myself with just being another B-Main contender when I can support those guys and possibly get a couple of guys into the A who are here purely to drive and succeed. For me this would not be driving a good 5-minute run, success is watching those guys take it to the next level and seeing Hara today (Monday) top the time sheets with the fastest lap ever around this track, to see that, man I never thought coming from a year ago when I was struggling a little bit, we had 3D printed parts on the car and nothing was perfect, to now topping a practice round at TITC against the best in the world. There is no one here that is not in the Top 10 in the world so it’s pretty surreal.’
Asking Ryan if this is his first time to work with Hara he explained, ‘yes first time ever, I mean we have been friends for a long time. We met back in 2010 at an ETS race in Germany, we got stuck at an airport together for about 5-hours while waiting for our flights back home. 15-year-old me star struck, sitting there with Hara just with 5-hours to kill.’ He continued, ‘They say don’t meet your heroes but honestly meeting Hara was one of the best things that could have happened to me cause his attitude and motivation, he’s funny, he’s just such an awesome guy so to now work super close with him, doing set-up changes run by run, getting his feedback, watching the car and everything, it doesn’t even feel real still. Seeing him put it P1 in a practice round its like come on man someone slap me! It’s been a pleasure to work with him and I hope I get to do it more in the future. Obviously Hara is wanted by several companies and i am one of the lucky ones to have his services for now. He has provided us with a lot of valuable feedback and stuff already.’
Summing up our chat, before letting Ryan get on with assessing Hara’s car which had just suffered a heavy impact crash, I put it to Ryan if the overall experience of getting the SP1 on the shelves of model shops has been enjoyable, and based on the tone of excitement in his voice it has and still is. ‘It’s like with anything when you’ve got that much on the line, you are going to be stressed, you can’t but not be stressed you know. Basically it’s a risk everything. I have already got a stable business and everything is fine and you go alright cut all of that we need to go to the next level, yeh its really scary but looking back now its the best thing I ever did because I’ve never had this level of motivation before in anything I have ever done in my life basically so getting this car to be the fastest thing in the world is all that matters to me in my business world. Right now it’s not about making profit, it’s about making the best car I can which is a personal fulfilment thing on one aspect. You can look back and go I made that sitting on the couch drawing in CAD, it started from late nights, it started from all those sacrifices that where made two years ago that are leading to this.’ Asked what he thinks when he looks back on his original design concept, laughing he replied, ‘It’s almost laughable to be honest. It was actually funny before coming here on the plane I was just scrolling through old photos and some photos of the actual car I used here last year came up and looking at it I was just shaking my head and thinking you can do better than this. I came back from TITC and I was not satisfied at all, it was still OK, it was still running in the C Final against the best in the world but this isn’t really where we really want to be and I am not the best driver and I knew that the car was obviously lacking as well so going back home, redoing 80% of the design and then releasing that into a production car a year later with some brilliant drivers and then putting it near the front I can’t really explain how rewarding it is to do that.’
