Monster Tajima and Graeme Manietta
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When Monster Tajima Walked Into Our EV Workshop
Before electric performance became normal, one of the kings of Pikes Peak came looking.
There are moments in a workshop that don't seem particularly historic when they happen.
Years later, you look back and realise where they sat in the timeline.
One of those moments for me was the day Nobuhiro “Monster” Tajima walked up the driveway of our electric vehicle workshop in Australia.
Tajima wasn't simply another visitor interested in EVs.
He was already one of the great names of international hill-climb racing, a man whose outrageous Suzuki-powered machines had become synonymous with the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb in Colorado.
And at the time, we were doing something at almost the opposite end of the performance scale. We were figuring out how to make electric cars genuinely usable on the road.
The Monster of Pikes Peak!
Pikes Peak is not an ordinary motor race.
The course climbs almost 20 kilometres through 156 corners, beginning at around 2,860 metres above sea level and finishing above 4,300 metres.
For an internal-combustion engine, altitude has traditionally been one of the great challenges. As the air becomes thinner, an engine has less oxygen available.
Electric motors don't have that problem. Tajima knew Pikes Peak extraordinarily well. He first competed there in 1988 and became the first Japanese driver to take an overall victory in 1995. His extraordinary Suzuki hill-climb machines became progressively faster and more powerful.
In 2007 he broke Rod Millen's long-standing course record in the Suzuki Sport XL7. Then came 2011.
Driving the Suzuki SX4 Hill Climb Special, Tajima recorded 9 minutes 51.278 seconds and became the first driver to break the famous ten-minute barrier at Pikes Peak.
By the end of his combustion-powered era, Tajima Motor Corporation records credit him with 10 Pikes Peak champion titles, including seven overall victories, six of those consecutively from 2006 to 2011.
Then he changed direction. He went electric.
But Just Before That, He Came to See Us.
This is where our little part of the story enters.
Oz Electric Vehicles was still working through the practical realities of converting ordinary vehicles to electric drive. Performance wasn't our priority. It couldn't be.
Battery technology was expensive. Components were expensive. Range was difficult. Charging infrastructure barely existed.
Building an enormously powerful electric race car was possible if you had the engineering resources and money to throw at the problem. We didn't.
Our challenge was different.
How do you make an electric vehicle that someone can actually drive?
How do you get useful range? How do you integrate regenerative braking properly?
How do you make the accelerator and regen work naturally together?
How do you select and control batteries, motors and electronics so the whole vehicle behaves like a car rather than an engineering experiment?
Those were the problems occupying us. And during that period, Monster Tajima arrived at the workshop. There is still a photograph from the visit.
He took our little green Suzuki electric conversion for a drive. And he enjoyed it.
But I also remember very clearly that it wasn't quite what Monster Tajima had been hoping to find.
He was a performance man. We hadn't built a performance car. We had built a practical electric vehicle. I think he could see the work that had gone into it, but his mind was naturally somewhere further down the road.
More power. More performance. More speed. For me, the visit was surreal.
Here was one of the best-known hill-climb drivers in the world walking up my driveway because he wanted to see what we were doing with electric vehicles in Australia.
Then Pikes Peak Went Electric.
The following chapter of Tajima's career is well documented.
After his record-breaking 2011 run in the petrol-powered Suzuki SX4, Tajima entered the 2012 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb with a purpose-built electric racing car, the Monster Sport E-RUNNER Pikes Peak Special.
That first attempt did not end the way his team wanted.
The E-RUNNER was extremely quick in qualifying but suffered a drivetrain failure during the race and did not finish. That is an important part of early EV history.
High-performance electric propulsion sounds beautifully simple: battery, inverter, motor, wheel. It isn't.
A race car subjects every electrical connection, bearing, driveshaft, motor, cooling system, controller and battery component to extraordinary forces.
Torque arrives almost instantly. Vibration is relentless. Temperatures climb.
Regenerative braking introduces another layer of energy control. And Pikes Peak gives engineers almost no room for weakness. The failure didn't stop Tajima.
It did what engineering failures are supposed to do. It taught them something.
Back Again ... and This Time He Won.
Tajima returned in 2013 with a heavily revised E-RUNNER.
The official specification listed two liquid-cooled GKN EVO eDrive motors, all-wheel drive, hydraulically controlled front and rear differentials, NTN constant-velocity joints and SIM-Drive control technology.
The team had concentrated heavily on weight reduction and reliability. It worked.
Tajima completed Pikes Peak in 9:46.530, winning the electric division and becoming the first electric car driver to complete Pikes Peak in under ten minutes. Think about that for a moment.
Only two years earlier Tajima had made motorsport history by breaking ten minutes in one of the wildest Suzuki combustion-powered hill-climb cars ever created. Now he had done it electrically.
The transition was no longer theoretical.
Four Motors Change What a Car Can Do
Tajima's electric development continued.
And this is where EVs began demonstrating that they weren't simply substitutes for combustion engines.
Electric propulsion allowed engineers to control the behaviour of individual wheels in ways that conventional mechanical drivetrains struggled to match.
Tajima's organisations were deeply involved in independent wheel control and in-wheel motor research through SIM-Drive, while his later Pikes Peak program pushed individual motor control to an extraordinary level.
For the 2015 Pikes Peak campaign, Tajima Motor Corporation, Monster Sport and Croatian EV company Rimac collaborated on the Tajima Rimac E-Runner Concept_One.
This was an entirely different animal. Four independent electric motors.
More than 1.1 megawatts- approximately 1,475 horsepower.
No conventional gearbox. No conventional differential. Each motor's power was transferred to an individual wheel through a dedicated reduction and chain-drive system.
And then there was the really interesting part: torque vectoring.
Steering With Torque.
Most drivers think of steering as something that happens when you turn the steering wheel.
An advanced multi-motor EV can do considerably more. Imagine a car entering a right-hand corner.
Rather than simply distributing power equally through a mechanical differential, the vehicle's control system can continuously alter the torque being delivered to individual wheels.
One wheel can receive more drive. Another can receive less. Regenerative braking can also contribute negative torque.
The result is that the electric drivetrain itself can help influence the vehicle's rotation through the corner.
Rimac's All Wheel Torque Vectoring system in Tajima's 2015 car monitored steering angle, vehicle speed, lateral and longitudinal forces, yaw and other inputs and recalculated torque distribution 100 times every second.
The four motors had effectively become part of the handling system.
That is one of the concepts Graeme remembers discussing and following closely as Tajima's electric program developed: once individual electric motors can be controlled independently, propulsion, braking and vehicle dynamics begin becoming parts of the same system.
At Pikes Peak in 2015, Tajima finished second overall in 9:32.401.
An electric car had beaten every combustion-powered vehicle in the field except the other leading electric entry. The world had changed.
From a Green Suzuki to a 1.1 Megawatt Race Car
There is no suggestion that Monster Tajima came to our little Australian workshop and somehow learned how to build his Pikes Peak car from us.
That would be nonsense.
Tajima had immense engineering capability around him, significant resources and decades of motorsport experience. Around the world, engineers, universities, manufacturers and independent workshops were all attacking different parts of the electric-vehicle problem.
What makes the visit significant to me is something else. We were there.
Oz Electric Vehicles was building and driving electric conversions at a time when EVs were still considered strange by most of the automotive world.
Our focus wasn't Pikes Peak. It was the road.
We were working on range, regenerative braking, battery systems, vehicle integration and making converted electric vehicles behave properly.
Tajima was looking toward the extreme-performance end of exactly the same emerging technology.
Not long afterwards, one of the world's most successful Suzuki-powered hill-climb racers abandoned combustion power at Pikes Peak and began racing electric.
That makes the photograph sitting in our archive rather special.
The Hot-Rod Shop of the Future
I've sometimes described our workshop as the hot-rod shop of the future.
That description probably makes more sense today than it did then. Traditional hot rodders took existing machinery and asked:
What else can we make this do?
That is exactly what we've spent years doing with electric vehicles.
Different motors. Different batteries. Different controllers. Better range. Battery upgrades. BMS and BCU integration. Conversions. Diagnostics. And, increasingly, performance.
Today we can work with electric performance in ways that would have been prohibitively expensive when Monster Tajima first drove our green Suzuki.
The technology caught up. The components caught up. And the knowledge accumulated. But somebody still had to do the early work.
Across Japan, Europe, America, Australia and elsewhere, small groups of engineers and enthusiasts were discovering what worked and what didn't long before electric vehicles became a mainstream industry.
We were one of them.
A Visit I Haven't Forgotten
I have met some extraordinary people because of electric vehicles.
Monster Tajima remains one of the memorable ones.
There was something slightly unbelievable about seeing a man of his stature in international motorsport simply walk up the driveway because he was interested in what we were building. He drove the car.
He looked at what we were doing. And then he continued on his own extraordinary journey into electric propulsion.
I remain grateful that, during those very early years, what we were doing in a small Australian EV workshop was interesting enough to attract people like Nobuhiro “Monster” Tajima.
And above is the photograph.
Sometimes one photograph tells you exactly how long you've been in the game.
PIC: Graeme Manietta (c) 2026 From the Oz Electric Vehicles archive: This photograph records Nobuhiro “Monster” Tajima’s visit to Graeme Manietta during the early development years of Australian electric vehicle conversion.
Graeme Manietta, Founder, Oz Electric Vehicles
EV Builder • Battery Specialist • Conversion Engineer • EV Troubleshooter
Nearly two decades working hands-on with electric vehicle technology.
Battery Upgrades • Diagnostics • BMS/BCU Integration • EV Conversions • Specialist EV Engineering