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Origins
Minoru Hayashi's Dome — 'child's dream' — unveiled the Zero at Geneva 1978: a wedge so extreme it made contemporaries look timid, barely 98 centimetres tall, Nissan L28 six behind the cabin, built by a tiny Kyoto racing constructor intending genuine production. Japan's homologation authorities refused it road certification; attempts via overseas registration and the developed Zero P2 also failed, and the road car died with perhaps a handful of prototypes. The project's legacy ran elsewhere — into Dome's long racing programme, including Le Mans prototypes, and into Japanese pop culture, where the Zero became a toy, a game car and an icon of what the country's engineers dreamed between oil crises. The prototypes survive, still looking like 1978's idea of 2020.
Dome Zero P2 · Greentrench · CC BY 2.0
