British company Stuart Taylor Motorsport has recreated a replica of the 1968 Honda RA302 Formula 1 car. If you know about the car’s history this may seem an unusual choice, as the Stuart Taylor website explains:
The RA302 of 1968 is something of an oddity, introduced with a magnesium skinned monocoque and an air cooled v8 engine it was certainly innovative and there had been plenty of outside the box thinking going on—the driving position was very far forward and left the drivers legs very exposed to serious damage though with hindsight that would have been a relatively minor bruise compared to the very public death of Jo Schlesser in a RA302 fireball at Rouen —after testing the car John Surtees wisely chose not to run the new 302 however Honda France chose to run the car with Schlesser and after 2 laps the car speared off the track and rolled, swiftly igniting the full tanks of fuel and trapping the driver in an appaling public cremation.
The car was never properly developed and Honda left the world of F1 racing soon after—one car can be seen in the Honda museum.
We came across the story via Road & Track and that’s where we found this impressive illustration from the magazine’s own archives. You can see a couple of grabs of the double-page spread here, but make sure you follow the link below for the full picture. It is seriously cool!
[Source: Road & Track]