Living with the Dead: 13 Kms
By Thomas O'Keefe
autosport.com senior writer

In a few days, Honda Motor Co. will submit its entry for the 2006 Formula One World Championship - the first time since November 1968, when the Japanese company started its last Grand Prix as a constructor. Thomas O'Keefe looks back at the sad events of the 1968 French Grand Prix, when Honda's Jo Schlesser was killed on his Grand Prix debut, and how the event affected the company's decision to withdraw from Formula One

Honda Motor Co. is back in Formula One in 2006 as a constructor for the first time since November 3rd, 1968, when Honda ran its last Grand Prix as a constructor in Mexico City, with John Surtees as the principal Honda entry, driving the Honda RA301 with a 3.0 litre V12 engine.

Although John Surtees was Honda's most successful Grand Prix driver, in the course of its last season in 1968, Honda retained other drivers on occasion to join Surtees for one-off performances, including Jo Bonnier for the Mexican Grand Prix and David Hobbs for the Italian Grand Prix.

But it was Honda's engagement of a 40 year-old Frenchman, Jo Schlesser, for the French Grand Prix that was to play a significant role in bringing the curtain down on Honda's first foray into Grand Prix racing, an event so traumatic to the company that in some ways it has taken Honda 37 years to recover from it.

Who was Jo Schlesser, and how did this relative novice become a Honda Grand Prix driver? Born in the former French colony of Madagascar, Schlesser had been in and about Grand Prix circles for years and had a solid background in French National racing, both as a sportscar driver and in open-wheel racing. Indeed, in 1962 and 1963, Schlesser had been the French Formula Junior Champion. He had also driven a Cobra Daytona Coupe to victory in the 1965 Sebring 12-hour and won the 1967 Rheims 12-hour race in a GT40 entered by Ford of France with Guy Ligier as his co-driver.

And interestingly, before Jo Schlesser became a real Grand Prix driver, he acted the part in the legendary 1967 movie, Grand Prix, playing a Jim Clark lookalike, driving a mocked-up Formula Junior car painted green and yellow to look like a Lotus and donning a dark blue helmet with a white brim, just like Clark's. Director John Frankenheimer even gave Schlesser a speaking part in the scene set before the Belgian Grand Prix, a drivers' meeting where the discussion was about dangerous track conditions at Spa.

Jo Schlesser's official first Grand Prix, though, was the French Grand Prix at

Rouen-les-Essarts in 1968, and it was a debut for all concerned. Although Schlesser had driven a Matra-Ford Cosworth F2 car in the German Grands Prix of 1966 and 1967 at a time when F2 cars were permitted to run alongside the Grand Prix cars, Schlesser had never actually driven a Formula One car in a Grand Prix until he was entered to drive Honda's newest creation, the Honda RA302, which featured an experimental air-cooled V8. So the 1968 French Grand Prix was a debut for both car and driver.

The Honda factory team had entered John Surtees in the V12 Honda RA301, itself a new car for the 1968 season, having replaced the V12 Honda RA300 "Hondola" with which Surtees had won the 1967 Italian Grand Prix at Monza.

The new Honda RA301, built mostly at Honda Racing in Slough, England, under Surtees' supervision, had been a source of frustration and disappointment for Surtees, retiring at Jarama (where Surtees had run as high as third place), Monaco, Spa (where Surtees led and had also set fastest lap) and Zandvoort; indeed, at every race in which the RA301 had been entered.

By contrast, the air-cooled V8 Honda RA302 to be driven by Jo Schlesser was wholly Japanese-designed and built in Japan and was a pet project of Soichiro Honda, founder of Honda Motor Co. and himself a racer in his early days. The last air-cooled engine seen in a Grand Prix car had been the air-cooled flat-eight Porsche 804, which had won Porsche's only victory in Formula One, at Rouen for the 1962 ACF Grand Prix. To save weight, the chassis of the Honda RA 302 was made of lightweight magnesium.

To round out the scene at Rouen in 1968, Soichiro Honda himself was in France on a trade mission that week and attended the race in person. It was decided on the Thursday morning before the Grand Prix that the Honda RA302 air-cooled V8 would run as an entrant of "Honda Racing (France)" and that Schlesser, as a popular French driver, should drive the RA302.

In addition, Surtees, who had tested the car in Japan and had run the RA302 in practice at Silverstone before the French Grand Prix, had made it clear that he preferred to run the V12 Honda RA301 Surtees had developed in Slough which he entered under the usual "Honda Racing" banner.

The weekend race schedule did not give Schlesser or his mechanics (who were a different group than the mechanics working on Surtees' car) a whole lot of time to familiarize themselves with the characteristics of the air-cooled Honda RA302. On the first day of practice, Schlesser spun and damaged a wheel but nothing unrepairable. On the second day of practice, Schlesser's times improved but he still only qualified 16th on the sparse 17-car grid; indeed, only Vic Elford is a Cooper T86B-BRM, also a rookie in his first race, was behind Schlesser.

But no matter. For Schlesser, this race was to be all he dreamed of: racing for the prestigious Japanese company at the magnificent Rouen circuit, with its fast flowing high-speed corners set out in the French countryside amongst rolling hills and embankments, was clearly going to be a high point of Schlesser's career.

The race started late and by the time it was underway, light rain was beginning to fall on track. Ickx, and his Ferrari 312 (which was on full wet tires), was into the lead on lap one while Jackie Stewart in the Matra MS10-Ford and Jochen Rindt in the Brabham BT26-Repco battled behind Ickx for second place.

Surtees's intuition, which convinced him to stay with the Honda V12 RA301, was being confirmed, as he had qualified in seventh place - ten places ahead and a full six seconds faster than Schlesser in the RA302 - but was already up to fourth place in the early laps, no stranger to driving in the wet.

Meanwhile, at the back of the field, Jo Schlesser struggled with the No. 18 Honda V8 RA302; once Elford got by in his Cooper, Schlesser was all alone trailing the field as the rain continued. On lap 3, Schlesser's engine was heard to be misfiring. it has been speculated that rain may have gotten into the electrics or the exposed induction and cooling intakes for the air-cooled engine, causing the engine to misfire and cut out. This led to Schlesser losing control of the RA302 during lap three of the race at the Six Freres curve, before the run down to the Nouveau Monde hairpin.

The car went sideways when the power cut off, then climbed an embankment and somersaulted, landing upside down, exploding in a blaze of fire with tanks full of fuel on board, since it was so early in the race. The highly flammable magnesium alloy, of which much of the car was made, led to a huge fireball in which Schlesser, trapped in the car, was killed; the fire was so fierce that the car could not be approached for 15 minutes and by then it was too late.

Schlesser had raced 13 kilometers.

The race and Surtees continued, despite Schlesser's accident; you can imagine the thoughts of John Surtees as he circulated lap after lap past the smoldering wreckage of his teammate's RA302 and the plume of smoke left behind. Surtees soldiered on and ironically finished second in the RA301, which was Honda's best finish in the 1968 season.

Although the team finished out the season, with David Hobbs and Jo Bonnier partnering with Surtees, the Honda Formula One Constructor Project, the First Generation as it is called in Honda's official history, ended that day at Rouen for all practical purposes, with the death of Jo Schlesser. In November 1968, after the last race of the 1968 season in Mexico City, Honda formally withdrew from Formula One.

Even today, there is speculation as to what happened that day at Rouen to cause Schlesser's fatal accident: was it driver error that could be put down to the rainy conditions or to Schlesser's relative inexperience? One of the Honda engineers thought that maybe the transmission had seized, causing the accident, but when the residual parts of the engine and transmission were examined back in Japan, everything was clean, so the cause, whether mechanical failure or driver error, remains unknown.

What is known for sure, is that the spring of 1968 was a season of death in open-wheel motorsports, and Jo Schlesser was among those for whom the bell tolled.

Jim Clark was killed in April 1968 at Hockenheim in an F2 race. Clark's Lotus teammate, Mike Spence, was killed a month later at Indianapolis in May 1968 while running laps in what would have been Clark's Lotus turbine for the 1968 Indianapolis 500.

On June 8th 1968, ex-Ferrari winner Ludovico Scarfiotti died during a practice run for the Rossfeld Hill Climb in Germany, driving a Porsche sports car. And on July 7th 1968, Jo Schlesser would become the last victim of this season of tragic loss, and it would happen in his beloved country of France and in a race that should have been his big chance but ended up being his last chance.

Formula One did not forget Jo Schlesser, even though he only raced one Grand Prix. Guy Ligier, the ex-rugby player, French industrialist and racecar driver, had just begun a partnership with Jo Schlesser the year he was killed at Rouen to run a pair of McLaren F2 cars.

When Schlesser was killed, Ligier had no stomach to go back to driving but did end up becoming a Grand Prix constructor, buying up the assets of Matra Sports and forming his own Ligier Formula One team. In memory of his fallen friend and partner, Ligier decreed that all the Ligier chassis numbers be prefixed with the initials "JS" - Jo Schlesser continuing in death the partnership he had begun in life.

To be sure, Honda completed the 1968 season after the tragedy at Rouen but the fire had gone out of the Honda factory effort. A second air-cooled RA302 chassis would be tried out again by John Surtees and David Hobbs at Monza during practice, but it never raced again after Rouen.

In time, Honda would come back to Formula One as a fabulously successful engine supplier to McLaren, Williams and Lotus, winning 11 championships and 71 races, with Ayrton Senna being the most visible evidence of Honda's success, having driven all three of the Honda's engines - the 1.5 litre V6 turbo (1987-88), the 3.5 litre V10 (1990) and the 3.5 litre V12 (1991-92) - and achieved 32 of his 41 wins and 46 of his 65 pole positions with those Honda powerplants.

Soichiro Honda, who inspired all this success in racing, died in 1991, and the Senna-Honda era ended completely the next year in 1992, when, appropriately, the great Brazilian scored his last career victory for Honda at the 1992 Italian Grand Prix, at Monza, often a lucky venue for Honda.

Gerhard Berger scored Honda's last victory in Australia in 1992 and, for all of the effort Honda has made teamed as engine supplier to BAR since 2000, Honda has still not won a race since that victory by Berger on November 8th 1992.

In 2006, Honda is putting its faith in another Brazilian, Rubens Barrichello, and another Englishman, Jenson Button, to take up the cudgels from their respective Countrymen, Senna and Surtees from an earlier time, and finally take Honda to the front ranks of Formula One constructors in a sport that is fast becoming a Superbowl of the world's automobile manufacturers, with Toyota, Renault, BMW and Mercedes-Benz already committed to the sport in a big way.

Although Honda is technically the newest manufacturer to make the ultimate commitment to Formula One by taking on constructor status, there can be little doubt that Honda will be building on the experience Honda Motor Co. has had from its earliest days over 40 years ago as a Grand Prix Constructor: two wins, one pole position; two statistics that have haunted Honda for 40 years but surely, not for much longer.