A short history of the Dome Zero RL

Back in the 70s and 80s Prototype racing was very popular, crazy machines with tons of horsepower using sophisticated aerodynamics all in one endurance racing series. Naturally this attracted manufacturers and many famous names such as Nissan, Lancia, Porsche but one small Japanese company called Dome was also very interested in prototype racing.

The project was started by Minoru Hayashi and he wanted to homologate the Dome Zero road car for racing in Japan however the company didn’t have the funds to go through with the strict homologation process and instead went to sell the car overseas in America, called the Zero P2

After the relative success of the car at auto shows and good reviews by car magazines, Minoru Hayashi decided to make a racecar called the RL (Racing LeMans)

The RL was designed by Dome head of design, Masao Ono. The car was meant to compete in the 24 hours of LeMans and hence it was designed with low drag in mind. The front of the car was very narrow and it was around 5 meters long in order to reduce drag, unfortunately all this did was make the car a handful to drive, it suffered with major high speed instability.

The car also featured a narrow glass canopy which would unfortunately make it rather warm inside the car on sunny days and hindered visibility at times it also caused vibrations and turbulence around the car, so it was chopped off.

At its first appearance at the 1979 24 Hours of LeMans, 2 cars were entered, both cars used 2.9 litre Cosworth engines however one car ran with 450hp while the other with 415hp. The cars qualified poorly in 15th and 18th, in the race however there were promising signs at first when one of the cars had gained 10 positions after the first hour however the cars didn’t last particularly long and Dome ended up retiring both cars before the night.

The car would be redesigned and entered agian for the 1980 however a gearbox problem early on in the race would mean that the car would cross the line in dead last. Another entery for the 1981 event would end in a DNF for the team.

After its disaster attempts at LeMans funds would run low for the team and the project would be stopped with Dome continuing to race Toyota built prototype cars throughout the eighties.