I have just seen a documentary on the Honda motorcar company of Japan and I wonder whether despite all the 'Malaysia Boleh' rhetoric, Malaysian national car manufacturers have anywhere near the skill and gumption of Soichiro Honda and his staff.

Honda founder and president, Soicihro Honda was determined to win in Formula One, so he got Shimomura, a winning motorcycle designer, to develop an engine for the Formula One car and he produced a 12-cylinder behemoth based on the design of motorcycle engines.

Honda got another engineer to design the car's body but upon seeing Shimomura's engine, this designer said it was too big and that he should make a smaller engine.

Shimomura got annoyed so the body designer did his best to build a body around the big engine, which was mounted in a transverse orientation behind the driver's seat.

Honda entered Formula One for the first time in 1964, but upon taking a corner, the car stalled and could not regain power. The engine had burned out and they had to withdraw from the race.

They tried again the next year with the same engine and body configuration and once again they faced the same problem.

Then, while en route to another venue, one of the staff with the Honda racing team saw a motorcycle race and noticed how the motorcycles banked when they turned. He then realised that the oil in their engines' crankcase remained at the bottom of the crankcase, as if the bike was travelling in a straight

line.

But in the case of a car, the oil flowed to one side leaving some of the pistons without lubrication and thus causing overheating. They quickly went back to Japan and this time Shimomura was willing to listen.

He designed a smaller engine and built in baffles to prevent the oil from flowing to one side. Honda entered the last race of the 1965 Formula One season in Mexico and won.

Honda funded its participation in Formula One over those two years with profits from its motorcycle sales. The modifications made to the racing car's engine were used in the engine of the Honda N360 mini-compact car, which made its debut in 1966 with an air cooled engine.

Now, Proton began a partnership with Mitsubishi about 20 years ago and it was hoped that by now, Malaysian engineers would have learned from the Japanese and would have become just as competent as them.

During those 20 years, we've all seen the price of national and non-national cars increase to the order of three to four times the people's annual salary. In 1980, a 1.3 litre car cost around RM14,000 which was just over a year's salary for a fresh graduate.

It would have been acceptable had the price of national cars remained the same while prices of both completely knocked down (CKD) and completely built-up (CBU) non-national cars went up due to protective tariffs.

However, the prices of both national and non-national cars both went sky high thus imposing a heavy burden upon the working public to subsidise the national car industry.

Twenty years later, we have this Proton/Volkswagen tie-up and history seems to be repeating itself again, with Proton now relying on Volkswagen to help it become more competitive.

Hopefully, Volkswagen will help Proton realise Adolf Hitler's original vision behind Volkswagen - that it would be the people's car, costing under 1,000 marks back then. At today's exchange rates, that would be about under RM15,000.

And where are Malaysia's equivalent of Soichiro Honda and his engineers after all these years? Perhaps we were too busy shouting 'Malaysia Boleh'.