Dig Racing Team

"A winning team in the past, this American team is in a slump. Their limited budget will make a winning season difficult to achieve."

―R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 (Grand Prix mode team blurb)

Dig Racing Team is a team from Ridge Racer Type 4 named after one of Namco's games: Dig Dug. Specializing in tuning Lizard, players will experience professional racers, and their tuning is somewhat inferior compared to other teams, making it quite difficult for the drivers.

The team is depicted as having problems, the most prominent being fund shortages and a business-oriented owner. Their main colors are cyan and yellow and their race number is 14 (presumably because of the team being considered unlucky).

Career quotes

See: Dig Racing Team/Transcript

History

Dig Racing Team is one of the older teams in Ridge Racer universe, formed in the 1950s and becoming popular in 1957. In the 1980s, it experienced a change of ownership where a food company that was once served as DRT's parent company got acquired by an oil mining company. It enjoyed a considerable success despite loss of manager Donald Louis to rivals Micro Mouse Mappy in 1988, until sometime before 1999, it suffered fund shortages and had a business-oriented owner trying to cut costs, causing a slump in their performance.

Manager

DRT Manager Robert Christman

The team's managed by Robert Chrisman, a 45 year-old American man. He's generally a well-mannered man, but the team's trouble did slightly embitter him, such as a business-oriented owner that caused one of his colleagues to leave the team and the fact that the owner plans to have the player replaced with a famous driver because the owner thinks that the player didn't generate enough publicity for the team, putting Chrisman at odds with the owner, and the aforementioned budget problems. Over the course of the season, he didn't want the player to be involved in the team's slump.

Post-R4

At the end of the season, the owner offered Chrisman another chance to manage the team with better salary. However, he rejected the offer and decided to retire from the racing scene. In the post-race epilogue, it's revealed that he had returned home to his wife and children.

Dig Racing Team later returned in Ridge Racer 64, using a facelifted Age Dirigeant.

In Ridge Racer 7, it is revealed in Ridge State News that Chrisman opened up a kart racing school, intended for kindergarten and elementary school children looking to be future racing drivers, and that Dig Racing Team is now known as Dig Dug, a bodykit manufacturer.

Trivia

• Robert Chrisman's English is good, even when he's talking, since he is American.
• Chrisman is mentioned in a Ridge State News ticker in Ridge Racer 7, where he is said to have founded a kart racing school for kindergarten to elementary school children who wish to become future racers themselves.
• The condition of the team is similar to the Tyrrell Racing Formula One team, itself also a successful team in its early years of F1 until the dawn of turbocharged cars in the late 1970's, after which the team suffered a slump and, following its disqualification from the 1984 season, never won a single Grand Prix until it was taken over by British-American Tobacco in 1998, becoming British-American Racing from 1999 to 2005.
  • To a much lesser extent, the team can also be compared to the likes of Williams, Ferrari and McLaren in Formula One, most notable for their past victories and championship titles, but have since been struggling to repeat their successes in modern times.
  • The team can also be compared to former NASCAR team Petty Enterprises, which was once a dominant team in NASCAR until the decline of Richard Petty's racing career, with the team's last win being scored in 1999 (by John Andretti), before merging with Evernham Motorsports (and later Yates Racing) in 2009 to form the reborn Richard Petty Motorsports, which merged again with lower-series team GMS Racing to become Petty GMS Motorsports in 2022.
• If the player scored two consecutive wins at the Final Heat, Robert will compare the player to Giuliano Gilbert, a former racing driver who passed away well before the events of the game, and the son of RT Solvalou's Enki Gilbert.
• In CGI renderings, a scale model, and Ridge Racer 64, the team is shown to use Age Solo cars. However, if the player chooses another team and does not choose Lizard as their manufacturer, the team will use Lizard cars instead.
  • The opposite occurs with Micro Mouse Mappy, where in artwork they are shown with Lizard cars, but has Age Solo as their official manufacturer.
  • Because of Lizard's involvement with the Dig Racing Team during their slump, this might have caused a financial downward spiral that doomed the entire Lizard company.
• The serif #14 font the team uses resembles those used by American motorsports legend A.J. Foyt, although Foyt's number lacks the italics effect. Italicized the other way around, the number font resembles those used by Stewart-Haas Racing NASCAR team, which was founded in 2009.