John Ward: It seemed that I always wanted to be involved in racing. As early as I can remember, my dad and I listened to the Indy 500 on radio. Later on, when I was 12 years old, I saw a cutaway drawing of an ATS formula one car. That was magic! While it was not a good car, the cutaway caught my imagination. From that moment on, everything that I did was focused on building and racing cars. In High School in Tucson, AZ., I built a fiberglass monocoque sports car! I read all that I could about fiberglass and the Chaparral cars. I never got around to the bodywork but we did drive it around a bit. I went on to get my degree from the University of Arizona. After that I designed, built, and raced my own Super Vee in the early 70's until the cost got out of hand. My first real racing job was at All American Racers as a Design Engineer working under Gary Wheeler.

Hiro Fujimori: I was born in Japan in 1952. I earned BE from Meijo University in Nagoya Japan. Before the MK III GTP work, I had engaged in the aerodynamic design and development of the Toyota Celica IMSA GTUs, GTOs, MK I GTP, MK II GTP, and '83, '84, '85 and '86 Eagle Indy cars. Currently I am working on motorcycle wind tunnel testing at AAR.

In my childhood, I had strong interest in vehicle's mechanism and competitions. These two strong interests lead me to design, build, and race with cars.

JW: The Toyota MKIII project was my 3rd tour of duty at AAR. I was the Chief Designer, Hiro Fujimori was the Aerodynamics Designer, and Jim Hamilton was the Race Engineer and Vehicle Dynamics Guru. Dan himself was of course involved as well as Drino Miller (at TRD then).

JW: When I started on this project, AAR had a MKII car that they were running, and they got it to win some races, but it was a very difficult car to tune. As with anything else, we benefited from what went before. It was clear that the MKII lacked front downforce, which was a common problem with all of those cars. Most cars at the time used the "European Style" underbody, i.e. one long underbody starting at the front of the nose and continuing back to the diffusers and on back. This was the way that the MKII was also. I came in with the advantage of a fresh look and a strong formula car background. What we ended up with was a separate nose diffuser, followed by a more or less formula car type underbody. The front tires helped pull air under the nose, and like magic, the nose was firmly pulled down. Hiro did a great job in the tunnel (1/10th scale moving road!)and Jim did a great job tuning the chassis. The car was very good from the beginning. Rocky Moran drove it first at a little track in N. Las Vegas. He knew right away that this was going to be a good car.