Honda Type R Story book review

Type R is Honda’s performance label and in these two large volumes Lionel Lucas takes us through the whole story of a Japanese firm’s search for speed from efficient road cars and its first tentative dabble in lukewarm performance waters to the great year when Honda engines propelled Ayrton Senna and Alan Prost to 15 wins out of 16 races. It’s a massive collection of pictures and facts, partly because it’s a dual-language edition with main text in French and shorter translations into English, often in grey type and not so readable.

I’d forgotten how many variations of model the Japanese giant has offered over the years until flicking through this avalanche of images, diagrams and many magazine covers and articles. Unfortunately the effect of so many short text blocks for both languages, often laid out on the slant, is distracting, giving a bitty appearance that makes it hard to read through. It can be entertaining – I enjoyed Lucas’s attempt to compare driving a Type R Honda to the umami flavour in food, and there is an excellent and rather beautiful page in Volume 1 illustrating how to heel and toe.

Volume 2 is where the single-seater racing cars live, though it does begin with a tour of the Swindon factory before it moves on to assembling the touring cars which have kept the sun rising on the race track for many years. There’s a lot of interest in the early years of Soichiro Honda himself, mad on cars and engineering from youth, which leads into the focus on racing, on two wheels and four. The layout calms down here, making it easier to read of F2 with Brabham followed by the bold move into Formula 1 with a 1500cc V12.

Honda has stepped in and out of so many arenas of racing: seasons of success in F2 Ralts contrasting with the overweight Spirit-Honda effort of 1983, before Williams and McLaren pushed the Japanese name to P1, as Red Bull later would. But even this is a small part of this big work as we dive into development of the NSX, the quasi-prototype Super GT and then drop back to basic Preludes and on again to road car technology, IndyCar, BAR-Honda… it’s a bit like walking in a hailstorm but with lovely views around you. Not a relaxing read, then, but it renewed my admiration for Honda’s engineering and innovation.

Honda Type R Story Collector’s Box
Lionel Lucas
Redrunner, £220
Vol 1 and 2 also sold separately

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The legend of the Formula Ford Festival
Ben Evans

Ben Evans’ Afterword sums up the most amazing thing about Formula Ford – its 50-year life. In that time it has brought on countless drivers who arrived at different levels of the sport, including F1, by offering intense competitive racing at an attainable level. Focusing on the FF Festival which tops the formula’s activities, Evans traces it from baby steps to its glory days in the 1980s and onto its quieter present years as a club event. Not many photos but plenty of reporting on its battles and intrigues. Simon Arron would have loved it. GC

Pitch, £25
ISBN 9781801501798

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Hitler’s motorcars
John Starkey

A bit off-message, but without Adolf’s own car enthusiasm we might not have had the great Silver Arrows. No, they don’t figure here, but I was intrigued to learn of Hitler’s keenness. John Starkey quotes a letter written from prison asking Mercedes for a discount, though he became very wealthy even before taking power so could afford ever grander machines. It includes a full run-down of the cars that conveyed the dictator, with good photographs – even on-boards. GC

Frontline Books, £22
ISBN 9781399071413

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Great British racing Drivers
Indira Flack

You’d expect a book of photographic portraits to be the work of a motor sport snapper, but Indira Flack comes at our world from a very different angle. Her great drivers range from champions to junior karters, while her left-field approach sees them stretched on sofas, hanging from trees, sitting on a scooter or a rearing horse. John Watson in waders and Perry McCarthy at the piano are among intriguing and insightful images. GC

Narrative Media, £38.98

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