JoSchlesser

Origins

Joseph Henri "Jo" Schlesser was born in 1928 in Liouville, Lorraine, France. He served as a French Air Force test pilot in the early 1950s before transitioning to motor racing in his late twenties. He raced French sports cars and rallied throughout the late 1950s, winning the French national rally championship and establishing himself as one of France's most versatile and brave drivers. He was a close personal friend of Jean-Pierre Beltoise and would later be the uncle of three-time French Sportscar Champion Jean-Louis Schlesser, who would race Williams Formula 1 testing in the 1980s.

Rise

Schlesser raced for Matra in the new Matra Formula 2 programme in 1965 and 1966, scoring podiums and demonstrating his single-seater pace. He drove for Matra at Le Mans 1967 and competed in international sportscar events. The Honda Formula 1 team — entering its second full Formula 1 season under team manager Yoshio Nakamura — signed him for the 1968 French Grand Prix at Rouen-les-Essarts on 7 July 1968. Honda was developing a new air-cooled V8 engine designated RA302; Honda regular driver John Surtees had refused to race the unproven car, considering it unsafe. Honda persuaded Schlesser to take the entry as French representation in front of his home crowd.

Championship Years

The Honda RA302 V8 air-cooled engine was a known difficult and overheating-prone design — Surtees had specifically refused to race it precisely because of these concerns. Schlesser, however, accepted the chance to make his championship-grade Formula 1 debut in front of his home crowd. The race was wet at Rouen on 7 July 1968. On lap 2 of 60, Schlesser's Honda RA302 left the road at the high-speed Six Frères corner, struck a barrier, ruptured the magnesium-bodied fuel tank, and the car burst into flames immediately. Marshals and the trapped Schlesser were unable to escape the fire; he died at the scene. He was thirty-nine. Surtees, who had refused to drive the car, would race in Honda's normal RA301 the following weekend at Brands Hatch under significantly different team conditions.

Style and Legend

Schlesser's death was directly attributable to the Honda RA302 design — a magnesium chassis paired with an unproven air-cooled engine — and was widely seen at the time as a preventable tragedy. Honda permanently retired the RA302 from competition after the accident and discontinued the air-cooled V8 programme. The Honda Formula 1 team withdrew from the championship at the end of 1968 and would not return until 1983. Schlesser's death came six weeks before the 1968 German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring where Jim Clark had been killed in April, and three months after the Italian Grand Prix at Monza where Jo Bonnier and Lucien Bianchi had been involved in the same multi-car incident — the period in 1968 marked one of the worst single-year fatality rates in modern Formula 1 history. Schlesser was the third Honda factory driver killed during the team's brief Formula 1 era.

Beyond Racing

Schlesser's nephew Jean-Louis Schlesser became one of France's most successful sportscar drivers in the 1980s and 1990s, winning multiple Sportscar World Championship titles for Mercedes-Benz and racing the Williams FW12 in 1988 Formula 1 testing. The Schlesser family racing legacy extended through the 1990s and 2000s in French sportscar competition. Jo Schlesser is buried at Liouville, Lorraine, near where he was born. His Honda Formula 1 fatality at Rouen 1968 became one of the major catalysts for the Formula 1 safety reforms that Jackie Stewart would lead through the early 1970s — the abandonment of the Rouen circuit, the modification of high-speed sections, and the eventual introduction of mandatory FIA fuel-tank crash standards. The Schlesser-Surtees-Honda RA302 episode is regularly cited in motorsport safety histories as a decisive moment in the transition from manufacturer-led to driver-safety-led Formula 1 culture.