About the Car
The F-V10 G1 is a generic 1997 F1 car. If you look at its features carefully, you can notice that its model is based on the Dome F105 - a 1997 chassis that didn't enter a single race.
The story with F-V10 G1 isn't necessarily about Dome, but how it represents F1 cars of its era without being identical with any of the qualified cars. The model works great for the 1997 season skin pack.
Dome's F1 story interesting. The company was founded in the 70s by race car builder brothers Minoru and Shoichi Hayashi. They built cars for lower series and their previous car F104 even won the Japanese Formula 3000 championship.
In 1995 they took on the challenge of entering F1 by designing a car for the 1997 season. It was a carbon-fibre monocoque with double wishbone suspension and pushrod dampers. It was to run on Goodyear tyres around 13" Rays magnesium rims - 280mm wide at the front and 330mm at the rear. Funnily enough at one point Goodyear suspected Dome was actually their Bridgestone's idea of industrial espionage. Gathering your competitor's tyre data would've been invaluable to Bridgestone. But as far as we know this was not the case and the tyre supply deal stayed.
Power was produced by a 3 litre Mugen Honda MF301 V10, naturally aspirated like all F1 cars then due to regulations. They used an Xtrac six-speed semi-automatic gearbox.
The car was launched in 1996, but unfortunately Dome had issues with funding and couldn't execute their full testing plans during the 1996 F1 season. They were able to test at Suzuka at the end of the season, but ended up being 7 seconds slower than Williams at pole and over the 107% qualification cut-off mark.
Sadly Dome also lacked sponsors and couldn't even enter the 1997 F1 season. Technical regulations changed too much for 1998 and rendered the chassis obsolete. Dome tried to find a way to salvage the F105 for another season through revisions, but at this point Honda was also making a return to F1 and would no longer supply Dome with their Mugen engines.