Motorsport art by Shin Yoshikawa

A detailed look inside street and racing cars

The cutaway motorsport art by Shin Yoshikawa looks back to an earlier age for inspiration. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Shell Oil commissioned a few cutaway drawings of racing cars that Shell was supplying with fuel and lubricants. A Ferrari 330 P4 and Chaparral 2F (left) were among those drawn. They were black ink on white paper and very detailed. The drawings took some of the mystery out of racing cars of the day. For enthusiasts, they were sources of great wonderment. The images found their way onto posters and into the imagination of countless future car designers and engineers.

There was so much in those drawings to look at. Detail after detail popped out, from the basic structure to the intricate pieces of the drivetrain. Very few folks knew what was going on “under the hood”. This was way before computers were used in the auto design process, so CAD drawings were not a thing yet. Cutaway drawings did the job for most of us.

The return of retro cutaway drawings

In his series of current drawings, Shin Yoshikawa takes us back to that time of wonderment with all-new cutaways. He’s been creating his drawings for more than 25 years and he can take as much as 4 months to hand-draw each new illustration! There are street cars in the mix, including Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, Lotus, Porsche and Mercedes. Racing cars include the Ferrari 330 P4, Ford’s GT40, Porsche 917 and Cobra Daytona Coupe.

They’re still sources of great wonderment. You can look at all of the CAD drawings you want, but none have the warmth of a pen and ink drawing. Nor do CAD drawings have the contextual ability of a fine drawing such as those from Mr. Yoshikawa.

You can see the full line of drawings by Shin Yoshikawa here.

For more racing art, click here.

A gallery of motorsport art by Shin Yoshikawa