25 replies to this topic

[William Hunt]

Well we know why Honda opted for Ronnie Bucknum for their debut (I still think that was a strange choice since he didn't have any single seater experience) and why they opted for Ginther (American since they wanted to sell more cars in the States + he was a top driver who could also develop the car) later on. It's also a bit weird that if they wanted to sell more cars in the US that they didn't enter the Indy 500 (well they did consider it since Bucknum tested at Indy at one point).

 

But what I find strange is: why did they never put a Japanese driver in their F1 car? That's in particular strange considering how they pushed for Satoru Nakajima to be in an F1 car in the '80s, why didn't they do that in the '60s? Surely there were capable drivers in Japan.

 

Who were the factory Honda drivers in Japan in those days?

And why didn't they push to get a Japanese Grand Prix on the calendar in the '60s? F1 didn't visit Asia back then and only in the 2nd half of the '70s ('76-'77) there was a Japanesen Grand Prix but only for 2 years.
Why didn't F1 return to Japan in '78? Why did it take so long to come back there?
Fuji was such a great circuit and they also had Suzuka, possibly an even greater circuit.

Edited by William Hunt, 17 June 2020 - 06:23.

[Michael Ferner]

There was a Japanese F 1 Grand Prix scheduled for April 1978, but it was cancelled fairly early on. I think it was mainly financial issues, i.e. the promoters lost money on the '76 and '77 races. That would probably also explain the lack of F 1 racing in Japan before 1976 (there was always a Japanese GP, since 1963), too expensive without a big sponsor. There were a few motorcycle World Championship races in the sixties, but they appear to have been very marginal in terms of economical viability.

 

Who were the factory Honda drivers in Japan in those days? There were none, Honda was a motorcycle manufacturer, they only had factory riders. 

[William Hunt]

But Japan had a Formula 2 series that started in 1967, didn't Honda power cars in that series in the '60s-'70s? Mitsubishi did in the early days as far as I know, Toyota as well in the '70s I think, BMW egined cars dominated it in the '70s.

And they also had the Fuji Grand Champion Series that started in '71 and was a bit the Japanese kind of Can-Am I guess. 

Surely Japan must have had a capable driver that they could have put in one of their F1 cars around '66-'68? Why didn't they do so?

Edited by William Hunt, 17 June 2020 - 08:01.

[Michael Ferner]

No, Honda did not enter or even only power Japanese F 2000 cars in the seventies. Mitsubishi ran a works team, with drivers like Nagamatsu or Masuko, but they were employees of the company and would not even consider to drive for Honda. Same for Nissan works drivers like Kurosawa, Kitano or Sunako. Maybe it's a cultural thing, but Japanese employees appear to very rarely change companies, they mostly stay "loyal for life", and that goes for factory drivers and riders, too.

 

The only four-wheeled thing Honda had on offer at the time was the little S800 touring car. I don't know (and don't think) they ran a factory team of those, but touring cars are not my thing so I really can't say wether there were capable drivers on Honda's payroll in the sixties or not.

Edited by Michael Ferner, 17 June 2020 - 08:25.

[Mallory Dan]

Perhaps they could have put Barry Fernally in the car? 

[GazChed]

Honda engines did dominate the last season of the one litre Formula Two championship in 1966, in the back of the works Brabhams driven by Jack Brabham, Denny Hulme and Chris Irwin. Whether this success prompted the Japanese to begin their own Formula Two championship I don't know, but Honda apparently took no part in it anyway.

[Ray Bell]

The S800 was a sports car, following on from the S360 and S600 (was there also an S500?)...

 

Honda certainly made a 'racing option' gearbox for it, with dog engagement and ultra-close ratios. I think it might have been a 6-speed too.

 

There were a couple of factory-equipped S800s in Australia, sounded great, threatened and beat much bigger cars at times, particularly at Warwick Farm.

 

Their early touring cars were things like the N360 and N600, we'd call them hatchbacks today.

[pete53]

I don't know about Japanese drivers who remained on home territory, but the only Japanese driver I can recall racing in Europe in the mid 60s was Tetsu Ikusawa. A competent Formula 3 pilot but probably not Formula One material. Mind you I would have said the same about James Hunt racing his Mini around the same time!

[GazChed]

Up to the middle of the 1969 season Tetsu Ikusawa's results were pretty good, a win in a prestigious race at Mallory and a second in the British GP support race (beating Ronnie Peterson by 0.7 seconds !) being the highlights. Unfortunately his results tailed off with mechanical woes and accidents after that.

[William Hunt]

well Honda did have one rider who they could have used in Formula One imho. Kunimitsu Takahashi was in my opinion the ideal candidate: he was a Honda driver on the scene of world championship motorcycling and succesful at that. Later on he would switch to cars (in '68 he was already entering car races), he would end up driving an F1 race in 1977 at Fuji (in a Tyrrell entered by the Muritsu Racing Team.  

 

There were at the time a lot of examples of drivers who succesfully switched from 2 wheels to 4 wheels: Tazio Nuvolari, Bernd Rosemeyer, Piero Taruffi, Achile Varzi, John Surtees (who won a world title at Ferrari), Jean-Pierre Beltouse Mike Hailwood and later on Vittorio Brambilla, and Johnny Cecotto. Even later Giacomo Agostini and Eddie Lawson tried it (he even made it to CART one season).

 

So with examples like Nuvolari or Surtees it was not unthinkable to transfer Takahashi to an F1 carreer around 1965-1968, he ended up doing Japanese F2 after all and Takahashi was succesful and very popular in Japan and ... he was a Honda rider!

https://en.wikipedia...mitsu_Takahashi

 

They ended up choosing a relatively unknown (certainly unknown in Europe where F1 was based) American driver who had never even driven a single seater before in his life so choosing a motorcycle racer like Takahashi was not a more risky choice at all. And since they didn't want to enter with a famous F1 driver initially because they didn't want  the pressure to immediately perform thus Takahashi would have fit right in there as well. And they had their star American driver later on with Richie Ginther anyway so they could have teamed up Takahashi with Ginther and Takahashi would have been able to learn a lot from Richie.

Edited by William Hunt, 17 June 2020 - 11:58.

[68targa]

Honda in 1964 and 65 was very different to Honda a few years later. It had a completre car to develop and only took part in 3 races in 1965 and the assumption being that they just wanted to be low key without expecting too much. Ronnie Bucknum was a relative unknown in Europe and so no-one would expect Honda to perform to the level of the others. Still a strange choice. Ginther was perfect for them as his testing and development were well known. American drivers probably made sense from a marketing viewpoint as well - 'Amercian drivers race Honda cars' etc.

 

Motor Racing in Japan at the time was very low key and it is a testament to Honda just how quickly all that changed.  Tetsu Ikusawa was probably the best Japanese driver in 1965 but only in the junior formula and with little real experience. He was quite young at 23. 

[William Hunt]

Just a small correction: it was in 1964 that they entered three races with Bucknum,

Another question: when did autosport really start to grow in a strong motorsport culture in Japan, when did they depart from those low key days? Already in the '70s (I assume that period) or nut until the '80s?

[Michael Ferner]

Takahashi, of course, is the 'wild card' here. I didn't mention him because I wasn't really sure when he made the switch to cars, and the whys and hows. I *suspect* that it was a move out of a mixture of frustration and desperation, after Honda's withdrawal from motorcycle racing at the end of 1967, so he may not really have considered racing cars before that, but I really don't know. I agree, though, in retrospect that looks like a very tempting possibility, though it may have been much less obvious at the time - impossible to say without further Input from someone with period knowledge of the Japanes racing scene!

 

Ikuzawa was pretty good in F 3, and later also in F 2. He raced for several years in Europe, so he had the necessary experience of international competition which was lacking in most of the homegrown talent, like Nagamatsu or Sunako. It makes a hell lot of a difference if you spend your entire racing career in the comfort zone of domestic competition. Once you leave that comfort zone, the guy you just outbraked may suddenly not "lay down and die", but turn around and fight back immediately, much like Alesi did with Senna at Phoenix in 1990. Even very good drivers need to adapt to their environment, much like Senna needed to adapt to that new "upshot" from the poor end of the pit lane. Many drivers, who spend too much time racing against local or inferior opposition lack the killer instinct once they are confronted with bigger fish. Ikuzawa, however, was too late on the scene for Honda's first dip into the F 1 pool.

[Michael Ferner]

Another question: when did autosport really start to grow in a strong motorsport culture in Japan, when did they depart from those low key days? Already in the '70s (I assume that period) or nut until the '80s?

I would guess that was a gradual development after the Japanese companies left motorcycle Grand Prix racing in the late sixties (Honda and Suzuki in 1967, Yamaha a year later). Japan had quite a number of really excellent, world class motorcycle Grand Prix racers, like Takahashi, Fumio Ito, Mitsuo Ito, Yoshimi Katayama and so on. So, the motorsport culture was strong already, but confined to two-wheeled competition. I think the problem thereafter was mostly down to a shortage of competitive domestic cars. I know Prince/Nissan and, to a lesser extent, Toyota built a number of very good sports cars, but my knowledge of sports car racing is very limited. Not until Honda returned with their six-cylinder engines in 1980, was there any hope for really competitive single-seater racing in Japan. March/BMWs were simply not enough of an attraction to pull the crowds in Nippon!

[PZR]

Only 14 posts in and already too many wide-of-the-mark assertions to fight off...

 

The answer(s) to the specific question(s) about Honda and Japanese drivers are probably best put to the people at Honda themselves. I suspect you've already pretty much answered part of the question yourself with the 'low key start' theory. 

 

In the wider context, Japan itself was changing hugely in the period concerned. There are parallels with post-war Germany and the United Kingdom in that Japan was still recovering from a devastating war (in Japan's case it was quite literally devastated) and it wasn't until the early 1960s that four-wheeled motorsport started to become viable again. Circuits started to pop up - some of them to survive, many not - and Japanese manufacturers started making automobiles that were viable for club motorsports use. Racing on four wheels was still for the privileged and the well-off, but change was rapid and growth was exponential once the holes in the cheese started to line up. Circuits/venues to practice and race on, suitable vehicles, people with money and time to take part and people with money, time and transport to enable them to spectate. The growth in the Japanese domestic auto racing scene between, I'd say, 1963 through 1969 was astounding. I have a collection of Japanese motorsport weeklies/monthlies on the shelves behind me and the expanding content for that period is visually evident as they grow from pamphlet size to spine-busting mags twice as fat as their British contemporaries. The content is almost forensic, sharing data and technique in depth. Ads for parts suppliers, classifieds and manufacturers. It got big, quick.

 

Honda 'works' motorcycle racers Kunimitsu Takahashi and Moto Kitano both switched to Nissan contracts when they moved from two wheels to four. Kitano told me that he was involved in testing some of the Honda Formula One machines ('first Japanese driver in a Formula One car') and his first races were in a Honda S600, but Honda wasn't really much involved in domestic racing of the period. Takahashi and Kitano's bread and butter living became racing all sorts for Nissan (Touring Cars, GTs, Sports Cars) as well as some testing and development of Nissan road cars. Proper work that Honda could not match. Both have stayed on good terms with Honda until the present day and it seems to be a special case where brand loyalty is shared and does not cause a problem. Ikuzawa? Perhaps too much of a lone wolf, a well-funded privateer with no obvious manufacturer allegiance except for Mitsubishi power in single-seaters. My impression was that he wanted to be an independent.

 

The Honda-specific question might have a one line answer, but the wider context of Japan's racing scene and Japanese manufacturers in the period is a much, much bigger topic.        

[Michael Ferner]

Thanks for chipping in - now that you mention it, I recall having seen Takahashi racing for Nissan, but as I said, I don't know much about sports car racing. And yes, Ikuzawa always seemed to be able and willing to plough his lone furrow. I didn't know he was well off, but that makes a lot of sense knowing he eschewed factory contracts and went to Europe on his own (or, was Yoshiatsu Ito already with him?).

[William Hunt]

Takahashi raced in a Datsun in 1968

[noriaki]

 

And why didn't they push to get a Japanese Grand Prix on the calendar in the '60s? F1 didn't visit Asia back then and only in the 2nd half of the '70s ('76-'77) there was a Japanesen Grand Prix but only for 2 years.

 

In the 60's, the Japanese didn't seem to care all that much about European style racing in general. Before the early Seventies, they appear to have been much more interested in what was going on in America. The Japanese GP, which I understand was always the "biggest" race in Japan back then, was run for Group 7 (Can-am type) sports cars in the late 60's. There was big involvement from Nissan and Toyota, who were also planning a Can-am program - only to be canned in 1970, when the JAF decided to give up on this type of sportscar racing and to focus on turning the GP into a single seater event. 

 

Guess it also tells something about the Japanese racing scene during the mid 60's (and in 1968 or so, Honda were already on the way out of F1) that they did host an important single-seater race in the 60's, with notorious european guest drivers like Stewart, Hill and Clark attending as well.

 

The race was a non-championship Indycar race, with a field made up of oval racing stars, and without a single local driver in the lineup! You'd guess that if there had been a single Japanese driver experienced enough and capable to compete in this race that took place so far away from the US, then they would have been given a shot... https://www.racing-r.../race/1966-04/X

Edited by noriaki, 17 June 2020 - 20:22.

[PZR]

In the 60's, the Japanese didn't seem to care all that much about European style racing in general. Before the early Seventies, they appear to have been much more interested in what was going on in America.

I don't see that bias at all. It's true that the initial proposal for Fuji Speedway was for it to be an Indy-like oval ostensibly for stock car racing, but that never really took off and the project was taken over by a conglomerate which proposed a road course, with the only remaining vestige of the oval being the banked first corner. If anything, Japan's automotive racing scene was very much catholic in taste and all-encompassing with the specialist press reflecting that, but if there was any bias it was slightly more toward the European scene.

 

Perhaps The First Great Lost Hope for an international-level Japanese driver, and therefore a good candidate for a Honda Grand Prix seat, was Tojiro Ukiya. Educated, travelled, funded, he and some friends (prominently Minoru Hayashi, later of Dome) had built their own matt black-painted modified Honda S600 (The 'Karasu'/Crow) which he was racing with quite some success. In July 1965 he took part in the 'All Japan Car Club Championship Race Meeting' (28 regional/marque oriented car clubs took part) at Tokyo's short-lived but very interesting Funabashi circuit, during which Ukiya 'demonstrated' an F3 Lotus 31 as part of an effort to promote an F3 series in Japan.

 

Ukiya took part in two races on that day, driving a Toyota S800 in the GT-I race and a Lotus 26R in the GT-II race, winning both. Tetsu Ikuzawa finished second in both races, Moto Kitano finished third in the GT-II race with Kunimitsu Takahashi finishing in 15th. A glimpse of Ukiya's potential against three names already proposed as contenders in this thread?

 

On 20st August 1965 Ukiya was driving the 'Karasu' S600 in practice for the KSCC 1 hour race at Suzuka Circuit when two oblivious spectators wandered onto the track at the fast 130R corner. In avoiding them, Ukiya crashed the Karasu heavily and was thrown out of the car, sustaining serious head and leg injuries, dying in hospital. 

 

It seems very likely that Ukiya could have gone far. He was just 23 years old. 

Edited by PZR, 18 June 2020 - 15:30.

[PZR]

Takahashi raced in a Datsun in 1968

In fact, Takahashi was already signed up and racing for Nissan's SCCN (Sports Car Club of Nissan) team by 1965. 

[nexfast]

As far as I know the first japanese driver to appear in Europe was Nobuo Koga, who drove for the Prince factory (later merging with Nissan) and participated in the Liege-Sofia-Liege races of 1961 and 1962. As all rules have exceptions, he moved from one conglomerate to other and signed with Honda, driving one (S 800) in the 82 Hours of Nurburgring in 1965 (all in all, different iterations of the Marathon de la Route). Seems he also had some link with the first Honda F1 but I was never able to understand precisely in what capacity.

[William Hunt]

I thought you were making a typing error when I saw "82 hours of Nürburgring" but to my surprise there was an 82 hour race:
http://touringcarrac...ring 82hrs.html

 

Notice who finished 2nd in that race: a Ford Mustang driven by none other than Jacky Ickx with Gilbert Staepelaere, what a duo, one of the greatest (well imho the greatest) sportscar drivers of all time partnered with one of the greatest rally drivers of his era

Edited by William Hunt, 19 June 2020 - 05:26.

[LucaP]

PZR - Thanks for your precious contributions.

Is there a book (available in english) about the development of the japanese racing scene (or similar)? I find the subject hugely fascinating.

Another question: what can you tell me about the Mutsuwan track? What I've read about it is certainly bizarre. Was it a missed opportunity? The reason for abandoning it was certainly strange.

[PZR]

PZR - Thanks for your precious contributions.

Is there a book (available in english) about the development of the japanese racing scene (or similar)? I find the subject hugely fascinating.

Another question: what can you tell me about the Mutsuwan track? What I've read about it is certainly bizarre. Was it a missed opportunity? The reason for abandoning it was certainly strange.

Thanks Luca.

 

I'm afraid that if there are any English language books covering the early Japanese racing scene then I don't know about them. Its a jigsaw puzzle where you even have to find the pieces before you can start putting them together. Fortunately Japanese sources are abundant and - typically Japanese - high on detail, and with the Japanese domestic racing scene being such a Galapagos-like scene there are lots of dark corners benefiting from the illumination. 

 

Period magazines are a good source; Auto Sport, Auto Technic, Car Graphic et al. I have a big collection of them and it takes up a huge amount of space. Contemporary sources are very very good. Magazines such as Racing On, Racing On Archives and - very much recommended - the Auto Sport Archives '100 Great Races' (each issue dedicated to a significant race in Japan) which has sadly slowed down publication frequency in the last few years but is nevertheless up to issue no.74.

 

You asked about the Mutsuwan circuit, and the Auto Sport Archives issue no.34 (published back in 1997) covered the inaugural meeting - the 'Mutsuwan 300' stock car race of July 1972 - in great detail and with lots of background information, Then-And-Now photos etc. 

 

Apparently no less than 92,000 spectators turned up at Mutsuwan to attend that inaugural event, but with very little in the way of facilities. Most of them were standing on bare earth banks! Mutsuwan's location - on the Shimokita peninsula in Aomori prefecture - over 650km from Tokyo and with fairly limited local draw of competitors was always going to be a limiting factor, but by all accounts the politics between NAC and JAF were a big problem.

 

  

Edited by PZR, 21 June 2020 - 14:08.

[FLB]

Thanks Luca.

 

I'm afraid that if there are any English language books covering the early Japanese racing scene then I don't know about them. Its a jigsaw puzzle where you even have to find the pieces before you can start putting them together. Fortunately Japanese sources are abundant and - typically Japanese - high on detail, and with the Japanese domestic racing scene being such a Galapagos-like scene there are lots of dark corners benefiting from the illumination. 

 

 

Have any of the books on Sachio Fukuzawa ever been translated? 

 

https://twitter.com/...312443487113216

[PZR]

Have any of the books on Sachio Fukuzawa ever been translated? 

 

https://twitter.com/...312443487113216

Not to my knowledge. Some of the titles I've mentioned above have covered Fukuzawa in special articles, and I remember at least one in a past issue of Nostalgic Hero (a classic car magazine) too. I will see if I can find them again. Bear with me...