"Here he comes, here comes Speed Racer, he's a demon on wheels..."
I am officially what the young'uns of today called 'old'. As someone who was born in the tail end of Generation X, I grew up in a world where telephones were attached to the wall via wires and had their own pieces of furniture, where computers were a thing you plugged into your television set, and where there were only 5 television channels (2, 7, 9, 10, SBS). That meant that if you were on the telephone that everyone could listen in, and if you were watching television that you got to see what was playing at that particular time.
Saturday mornings were the exclusive domain of kids' television; with cartoons from Warner Bros. and Hanna-Barbera being played for the Nth time in syndication and where anime had been repackaged so that the kids weren't aware that it came from Japan. This is a land where Kimba The White Lion, Prince Planet, Astroboy and Voltron played alongside The Flintstones, Josie And The Pussycats, Bugs Bunny and before the resurgence of Disney as a force.
Speed Racer, the story of a presumably 18 year old kid who drives a sports car in a series of not very well races and in an undefined racing series, is the story of someone having unnecessary adventures; while at the same time exhibiting incongruent traits of obedience, submission, narcissism and psychopathy on occasion. When the Wachowskis turned it into a live action movie in 2008, they interpreted the source material through the completely justified lens of the whole thing being a malarial fever dream. Everyone who saw that movie got super-extra-diabetes just by looking at it because it was so sugar/saccharine colourful.
As a boy who was and still is obsessed with watching motor racing, even then I knew that the cars on screen in this cartoon, were sometimes thinly veiled palette swaps of actual motor cars. Look through the various episodes of Speed Racer and you will find a Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR, Jaguar D-Type, Chevrolet Corvette Mark I, and Ferrari 212 Barchetta and other sports cars from the 1950s and 1960s.
Speed Racer's car, which in-universe is the Racer Mach 5 (Mifune Maaha Go in Japanese), is supposed to be an in-house privateer effort which is built by legendary motor builder 'Pops' Racer. Exactly how this is financed in the show but given that this was the age of the 1960s and still at the height of the garagistas, then perhaps it does not need to be. Enzo Ferrari had branched out on his own after building cars for Alfa Romeo and Lancia, Colin Chapman had been successful with his Lotus company, and Jack Brabham had won the Formula One World Championship in a car that he'd build himself.
However, the story of the actual car that Speed Racer's Mach 5 is based upon, is itself a strange tale.
Honda who has already gone motorbike racing decided to turn its hand at building Formula One cars in the 1960s. Ritchie Ginther won the Mexican Grand Prix one year but that was it. Honda very quickly abandoned its motor racing program and wouldn't return as an engine builder for quite some time.
The Prince Motor Company on the other hand, decided that it could take its S54 Skyline GT sedan and go motor racing with it. Prince entered the 1964 Japanese Grand Prix for sports cars and managed to take all of the positions from second through sixth; which wasn't bad as all for a sedan which was competing against proper sports cars. They were only beaten by a Porsche 904.
Having been beaten but a mid-engine sports car, Prince decided to follow suit and mated an upgraded version of their engine (called the GR-8) to a Brabham BT8 chassis; with a Hewland 5-speed racing gearbox in the transaxle. The 1965 Japanese Grand Prix for sports cars was cancelled due to lack of interest but before the 1966 event, Prince had found another 10% of power and their GR-8 engine was now throwing out 220bhp. The R380 would claim a 1-2 victory in 1966; be beaten by Porsche 906s in 1967, before Prince was bought by Nissan Motor Company. Nissan developed the R380 into the R381 and they were again beaten but the R380 and R381s took podium positions until 1970 and a 1-2 in the 1969 Surfers Paradise 6 Hour Race in Queensland.
Having been bought by Nissan, the Skyline name would again sit on various kinds of sedans and coupes; including the Nissan Skyline GTR, which won various Group A races around the world and is now famous as a result of Super GT racing and GT3. Given that the R380 exists before any of the Nissan Skyline GTRs do, I wonder if this slightly conquering car is the first of a line which eventually becomes Gojira. Given that it also had an inline-6, then I think that this is at least a half-way reasonable case.
What I have no idea about is what the producers of the Speed Racer anime knew of the Prince R380 when they originally commissioned the series. The Mach 5 changes whenever the demands of the series demands and on multiple occasions Speed Racer's younger brother and their pet chimpanzee hide out in the trunk, which is where the engine should be in the Prince R380. I suspect though, they simply didn't care. This was after all, a program for children's television.
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