Koichi is a rare synthetic Steelframe pilot, an Android manufactured by Aoba Lifelike Systems Specialists who harbors a deep and abiding love for racing very big machines. He is very cocky and highly competitive, certain in his own merits and always eager for an opportunity to prove the superiority of his skills. More than just winning by conventional tactics, Koichi loves to find novel, atypical or unexpected ways to back up his boasts and take an opponent by surprise- he won't just follow the path of least resistance or jump on the proven strats to beat the competition, he wants to prove that he can win on his own merits, in a way he devised all on his own. To his credit he's pretty good at doing this, putting his synthetic cortex to work examining not just the rules of a contest but the flow of participation to find underappreciated facets that haven't been deeply explored, and working out ways to thrive within those spaces. He's arrogant, but he's very high-effort about it. It's respectable, in a way.
While he enjoys competition in many forms, at the very core of his synthetic heart Koichi is a rally racer, yearning to pit engine to engine, iron to steel, across miles and miles of untamed terrain; whether it's the sand-blasted deserts of Mars or the volcanic ice of Enceladus, Koichi will find his way to the starting line. A regular participant in Ferry's pan-Solar racing circuit, Koichi pilots his specially-modified Steelframe, callsign Marathon, in races across treacherous and unyielding terrain where speed and precision are life-saving and cup-winning properties. Ferry's rules are simple: he picks a moon or a planet, he picks a starting line and he picks a finish line, and one way or another you gotta get from one point to the other before anyone else does. Hoverthingies are allowed, but they gotta stay mostly on the ground; flying defeats the whole point of the contest, you know? Oh yeah, and one other rule: no Mercurians and no Delta droids. Deltas in particular, they're good at plotting routes- it's what they're built for, and part of the challenge is finding your own way through the rivers and ravines of a rally race course the old-fashioned way. Rules don't say nothing about any other kind of Android, and they don't say nothing about Steelframes, so Koichi got to thinking, and he came up with a real clever way to win himself some pan-Solar rally racing titles. There's a way in here to make this work.
One of the major risks in becoming a Steelframe pilot is the invasive neural implant, which has a coin-flip rejection rate among organic pilots with no second chances if your procedure lands on tails. Koichi is an Aoba droid, his whole chassis was originally designed to accept organic brains and his actual brain is a synthetic cortex designed to simulate meat noodles in a way that is compatible with the Aoba chassis' original design intentions- it's a recursive way of realizing, hey, you know what might work? Koichi thought, if his brain is "like an organics" in the way it's structured and the way it sends and receives signals, can it accept a Steelframe's neural implant like one? It turns out the answer was yes, asterisk. Being an Android, it was trivially easy to simply remove the top of his head and work directly on his synthetic brain. The squishy bits are all in the right spots, so the physical act of receiving the procedure was remarkably simple. The risk was all in the outcome: Koichi wasn't sure what kind of effect adding such a feature to his brain would have. The surgeon who performed his procedure theorized that a power shortage might cause his central identity core to blank, effectively "rebooting" him with a freshly-rolled personality seed, and that's goodbye bravado for Koichi. The neural implant may have interfered with the synthetic way his brain routed signals within itself, which would not be a recoverable state for him and would basically be game over for good. She even warned that the procedure could be a success but his brain may not accept feedback from a Steelframe the way he wants it to once he wires into the cockpit, which he had no way of knowing before he tried. The risk profile compared to an organic pilot was different but distributed across a variety of other negative outcomes- no one's tried the procedure on an Aoba brain before, and Koichi insists he's built different. Turns out his procedure went fine, and now he's one of a very rare subset of an already rare class of people, a synthetic Steelframe pilot.
Running a Steelframe in a rally race turned out to be a brilliant idea. While it follows the rules and the spirit of the competition, it approaches the challenge of a race in a way that no one else has attempted before, from an angle no one's ever thought to test. Most other vehicles navigate rocky, treacherous terrain with some amount of wheels and a lot of forward momentum; what Koichi can do in Marathon is jump, climb, slide, pivot and crawl across obstacles that would spell collision for a proper car. "It ain't a sprint," he loves to tell his opponents, particularly those in vehicles with higher top speeds than Marathon is capable of. It ain't an oval course, it ain't a paved roadway and it sure as stones ain't a straight shot to the finish line- it's a test of skill, nerve, endurance and luck finding the best route to the finish line before anyone else can. A lot of racers have chased the dream, but before Koichi came along, none of them ever thought to put a Steelframe to the task. That's why Koichi is different. He finds those new facets, and that's how he leaves his competition in the dust. Always innovate. Never let 'em see it coming.