The Road Rat x Fyshe
The world’s first fire-retardant magazine cover
FIA Standard 8856-2018 – ‘Vêtements de protection pour pilotes automobiles’ – is a 50-page document that you’d do well to swerve on a Friday night. But The Road Rat has become more than a little obsessed with those vêtementsof late, and one in particular: the race suit.
As you may have noticed over the last few days, we’ve been teasing something very special – a final flourish for our otherwise near-sold out ‘A Love Letter to Formula 1’. This will arrive in the form of three highly-limited, hardback versions of Edition 21, each hand-bound in the exact same fire-retardant Nomex material as passes the outer material testing mandated by the FIA for every F1 driver. We are calling these versions simply ‘Red’, ‘Black’ and ‘Off-White’.
It’s been a journey to get here. Working in close collaboration with automotive apparel specialist Fyshe, no corners have been cut in producing what, we are delighted to announce, is the world’s first fire-retardant cover for a car magazine.
Fyshe is known for its exacting production standards and every aspect of its industry-leading work is reflected here. The hardback covers are padded and then wrapped with genuine Nomex developed by DuPont to top current safety standards. Weighing 150g per square metre, the material conforms to Flame Resistance ISO 15025:2016, protecting the body (or magazine cover) from flame for a minimum of twelve seconds.
The thread used for the diamond quilting and logos conforms to the same standards and is embroidered directly on to the material as per the race suits. ‘FIA rules state that logos must be embroidered to the outer material only, so as to ensure no breakages in the layers,’ explains Fyshe Founder Christopher Nurse, ‘otherwise the suit is voided and will fail scrutineering.’ Meanwhile the font selected for the main cover line evokes those used for driver names on many race suits.
The embroidery is testament to Fyshe’s industry-leading craftsmanship, and to The Road Rat’s mildly fixated reluctance to compromise. The thread count for the embroidery on the complete cover extends to a scarcely believable 43,227, while the wording ‘The Road Rat’ on the front cover alone has a thread count of 9,549. ‘We have our own in-house embroidery specialist who created the DST files for this collaboration to the highest quality, which would be seen as impractical for other garment manufacturers due to the amount of time spent creating them,’ Chris adds. ‘One logo can take up to eight hours to create, working with Tajima embroidery machines using preparatory software.’
For context, Fyshe race suits start from £2,500 and each one is bespoke designed and made-to-measure at its atelier in the Veneto region of northern Italy. While their branding is discreet, their products are widely seen. Even in Edition 21, as it happens. The race suit worn by Mario Andretti in our F1 champions photoshoot from the Goodwood Festival of Speed is a period-correct example made by Fyshe to full, current FIA safety specs.
Similar painstaking processes used in that case have here been applied to Edition 21, which is why they have to be so strictly limited. The three colour ways will be made available in runs of just 75 editions and hand-numbered on the end papers. Available early to newsletter subscribers, they will be priced at £125 before postage, shrink-wrapped and shipped in a Ratino-branded box. We should point out that they aren’t included as part of a magazine subscription, and once they’re gone, they’re gone. Due to the handmade nature of the binding process, every example will be slightly different, a unique and highly collectible closing chapter to our celebration of the F1 World Championship’s 75-year history.
The link for this exclusive copy of Edition 21 will be live Wednesday 3rd December at 18:30 GMT/ 10:30am PST on TheRoadRat.com.
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