HONDA’S TORTURED PATH TO ITS F1 CHANCE WITH RED BULL IN 2019
Honda can broadly find its path to Formula 1 redemption with Red Bull in a few butchered words from Rudyard Kipling:
“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you; if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too. If you can dream, and not make dreams your master, if you can think, and not make thoughts your aim; if you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same. You’ll be a Formula 1 title challenger, Honda-san!”
Kipling’s sign-off to a slightly longer poem might have been a little different, but his masterpiece has astounding relevance when charting Honda’s rapid turnaround from Mclaren reject to Red Bull’s choice for a title-challenging engine.
Honda insists it never considered quitting F1 when it agreed to terminate its relationship with Mclaren after three immensely difficult seasons, a sour end that also offered a sweet release. Honda’s silver lining was replacing Mclaren with Toro Rosso, knowing a possible Red Bull partnership was on the cards if it succeeded where it had previously failed. Red Bull’s frustrations with Renault’s development stagnation, at least compared with Mercedes and Ferrari, were ever-present, but it was still winning races. Honda would represent a switch to a manufacturer yet to power a team to a podium.
Before last month’s French Grand Prix, Red Bull announced it would take that gamble. Many conditions have been met to reach that point, but others remain. There is no escaping the depth of Honda’s struggles from 2015-17, which reached a nadir in the third season. During Honda’s obvious and public difficulties, Mclaren twisted the knife by insisting how good its car was. Fernando Alonso fired the first major jibe in the first season with his “GP2 engine” comment during Honda’s home race in Japan. In ’16 Mclaren said it would have won races with a different engine supplier. In ’17 the rhetoric was that the car was the best through the corners.
Honda could have wallowed in self-pity during the maelstrom of criticism and public shame, but as Mclaren pointed fingers, Honda persevered with its development work, the impact of which had been lost behind the headlines.
Switching to a Mercedes-style engine layout required an oil-tank redesign that Honda got dramatically wrong thanks to problems that had not emerged during dyno testing. The same went for a combustion engine change that was causing a loss of torque when upshifting, creating driveability problems. The oil tank cost Honda crucial pre-season testing mileage, so it took even longer to identify and solve the new package’s other limitations.
“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you”
For all the misery of the first half of the season, and Honda missing development targets as it tried to catch up, once it did clear those early, unexpected hurdles the performance and reliability of the package improved. The situation was not as bad as it looked externally.
“The headlines, and the very public thing you have with reliability, masked the fact that not only did they overcome all those problems but they made progress as well,” says Toro Rosso technical director James Key. “So, by the end of the year they were pretty good, pretty close to Renault, and the reliability problems had been ironed out.
“They weren’t able to show their full performance when they had such a difficult set of circumstances. When they were, it wasn’t highlighted anywhere nearly as much, but by the end of the year you could definitely see the improvement.”
While Honda’s research and development bods retained focus on the technical package, its chiefs were exploring alternatives to Mclaren. A deal with Sauber looked on the cards, but was canned because the Swiss team was undergoing a revival of its own and new team principal Frederic Vasseur did not want an unknown quantity of an engine during that process.
Then Honda recognised the benefits of Red Bull’s growing frustrations with Renault. While Toro Rosso would represent a step back from Mclaren in terms of team stature and (in theory) competitiveness, it would also give Honda the chance to take a big leap forward with Red Bull. Red Bull’s decision to put Toro Rosso with Honda was a strategic one so it could monitor the manufacturer closely. This would stop any guesswork and make its own 2019 move less of a gamble. Red Bull was pleased with what it found.
“This is a very different situation than Mclaren found themselves in,” says team principal Christian Horner.
“Honda has matured. They’ve got a good structure in place, they’re on a good development path.”
Honda’s technical capabilities in Sakura and Milton Keynes are unquestionable, but for some reason it was failing to turn that into results. Two key staff changes at the end of the year provided important missing puzzle pieces, helping validate Honda’s faith in the project but addressing major doubts that had existed before.
With F1 project leader Yusuke Hasegawa stepping down in December 2017, Honda split his responsibilities between Toyoharu Tanabe, who took charge of trackside operations as Honda’s F1 technical director, and Yasuaki Asaki, tasked with heading up the development work at Sakura.
Asaki-san worked on the original Mclaren-honda F1 project in the 1980s on the R&D side, but like many employees moved elsewhere within the company. He became an extremely valuable road-car asset, ascending through the ranks and ultimately rescuing Honda’s ailing kei car (small vehicles designed for
Tokyo’s busy streets) project. His managerial nous was considered a valuable asset for Honda’s F1 aspirations as well, so his focus moved to Sakura last year – then he assumed overall responsibility for the R&D side when Hasegawa left.
Arguably Asaki’s greatest impact was to give Sakura’s immediate focus to one project and complete that without trying to do too much at once and failing. This gelled well with Tanabe-san, a former F1 chief engineer – and head of Honda’s Indycar project when Red Bull’s head of race engineering
Guillaume Rocquelin was working in the States – who was not minded to take risks in pursuit of reliability.
With the right people in position and no major engine design overhaul planned for 2018, Honda established a strong early base. Red Bull then made a major contribution to the project. Honda’s dyno testing had let it down 12 months earlier, but thanks to Red Bull Technologies it now had access to rig facilities that would let it simulate the real-world impact of being fitted to a car much better than just on a dyno bench. An intensive run of pre-barcelona testing work was completed, and identified some potentially major problems that Honda would otherwise have missed. Honda launched its Toro Rosso partnership last year with the bold aim of finishing in the top three, and its ambitions have remained lofty. It outlined a development plan to Red Bull behind the scenes, which is why Red Bull said it wanted to judge Honda and Renault on their respective Canadian Grand Prix updates – the first spec changes of the season. Red Bull would have first-hand experience of both manufacturers’ targets, and actual results. Given Honda’s failure to give Mclaren what it wanted, when it wanted, this would be an important test.
“If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too” “If you can dream, and not make dreams your master, if you can think, and not make thoughts your aim”
Four drivers’ championships, four constructors’ titles and 58 wins make the Red Bull-renault Formula 1 partnership that ends in 11 races one of the most successful in F1 history. Yet through the transition from the 2.4-litre normally aspirated V8 era to the current V6 turbo hybrids the relationship soured into a flimsy marriage of convenience.
During the 2.4-litre V8 period, Renault didn’t have the most potent engine, but it did work effectively to maximise the potential of exhaustblown downforce. But the impending introduction of the 1.6-litre V6 turbo-hybrid engines for 2014 meant there was trouble on the horizon.
Flavio Briatore departed after the emergence of the Singapore Grand Prix deliberate-crash scandal, then Jean-francois Caubet took over before Jean-michel Jalinier stepped in for the transition to the V6s. He departed in July 2014, to be replaced by Caterham team principal Cyril Abiteboul, having blamed Renault’s poor performance and unreliability on a lack of funding in the engine programme relative to standard-setter Mercedes.
Although the 2014 engine did make gains (improving by 5% on efficiency over the season), and Red Bull won three races when things went wrong for Mercedes, the following season was worse. At this point, the relationship fractured irreparably, with Red Bull frustrated at the problems – not to mention Renault working on creating its own works team – and Renault unhappy with the constant complaints in public.
A new deal had to be struck for ’16, with the Renault engines rebadged as TAG Heuer. It was an uneasy necessity on both sides.
Any pretension of pseudo-works status was shot down by the fact that Red Bull had to accommodate the engine installation requirements of the Enstone team that again became Renault for 2016. There were also problems with fuel supply, as Renault parted company with Total and
Red Bull struck an alliance with Exxonmobil that they also took to Renault, only to be surprised when Renault opted instead to link up with BP. From there, it was difficult to get the required dyno time for fuel testing.
With Red Bull’s attempts to strike deals with Mercedes and Ferrari coming to nought, Honda’s Mclaren divorce presented an opportunity. A deal with Toro Rosso for this year was struck to evaluate Honda.
While Honda showed a step in Canada, Renault’s small gain of 9-10bhp was hard to detect on track. Originally, the plan was to evaluate Honda again over the French GP weekend. But Renault forced the issue between races, which led to a quick final decision from Red Bull that then felt obligated to announce the deal before Renault’s home race.
It’s understood there was even a brief discussion about the Renault engine being allowed to be badged Aston Martin for Renault to keep
Red Bull on board, but the team’s mind was made up. Over the course of just a few days, the Red Bull-renault partnership finally came to an end.
However, Honda complemented its bigger long-term goals with a short-term focus on Toro Rosso. The idea, says Key, was to prioritise reliability and give the package a solid base to work from. That would prevent Honda being blinded by its bigger long-term target and fall back into an old, risky habit of trying to do too much too soon.
“They were a little bit in recovery mode and in some cases a bit stressed after the previous year,” says Key. “We gave them what we thought they had to achieve in terms of raw performance and also some ideas of where we needed to be with other aspects.
“I’ve read a lot that with Toro Rosso the pressure was off – the pressure was not off at all. We’re not going to sit there and say, ‘Don’t worry guys, just do what you need to do’. The pressure’s on. We tried to create an atmosphere where they felt comfortable and be as disappointed as us if something went wrong.”
Honda’s efforts were beginning to snowball now Toro Rosso, and Red Bull Technologies, were able to get into the nitty-gritty work over what Tost calls “intensive” winter months. Pre-season testing was unrecognisable. Toro Rosso racked up the mileage, and performance was good too.
One setback was that Honda and Toro Rosso knew they would head into the season with a “known issue” with the MGU-H, which did rear its head in Australia and lunched Pierre Gasly’s combustion engine. A solution was already planned for Bahrain, where Gasly finished fourth, trumping any result Honda scored with Mclaren.
By this time, Red Bull was already pretty convinced. All that was left as far as Red Bull was concerned was “delivery”, says
Horner. “Over the years you hear a lot of numbers mentioned, but seeing it delivered trackside is ultimately what counts.
The stopwatch doesn’t lie. We could see the progress and measure it following the Canadian GP.”
Red Bull was clearly impressed. Honda did not explicitly outline its upgrade package, but said it was “mainly” to the combustion engine. Brendon Hartley also let slip over the weekend that he didn’t have the “upgraded” MGU-H. Gasly had an MGU-H change after a problem in practice in Canada, which suggests a problem with this component, but there has not been a flurry of MGU-H woe since. That means Honda made a performance step, but does not appear to have slipped back to a fundamental reliability problem with its energy recovery system like in 2017. While convincing Red Bull marked a huge win for Honda, it is only the beginning: Horner says there is “still a significant chunk” to get to the level of Ferrari and Mercedes.
During the British Grand Prix weekend Toro Rosso’s straightline speed deficit was laid squarely at Honda’s door, but Red Bull driver Daniel Ricciardo claimed that Renault was costing the senior team around the same sort of performance and Horner says Honda is currently “within 1%” of Renault, so Red Bull is not unduly worried. Horner believes it would still have won this year’s Chinese and Monaco Grands Prix with Honda power.
The main thing is Red Bull thinks its soon-to-be-partner has “the resource and the capacity” required to develop. Honda joined the V6 turbo-hybrid era party a year later, and has been adding to its catch-up workload with mistakes and design flaws along the way. Renault’s been making similar errors, even with a year’s headstart, but is adrift.
“One of the biggest issues that Renault have struggled with is probably the financial commitment to the R&D process,” says Horner. “Mercedes have spent a lot of money, and invested heavily, as have Ferrari. These power units are extremely complex and you can see now that there are still incremental gains being made with the introduction of each power unit. We’ve got to close that gap as well.”
Honda has ticked a lot of boxes, but what it must avoid as it moves into the realms of ‘conditions to be met’ is undoing some of the progress. This is what happened in 2017, when it felt it had reached the limit of its initial ’15-16 package and plotted an overhaul that targeted triumph and ended in disaster.
Red Bull does not fear that. Horner is eyeing a “relatively straightforward” integration, as RBT already knows what the Honda engine needs from the gearbox and chassis to accommodate the differently-shaped package. One thing
Red Bull presently lacks with Renault is an ability to have input into the engine’s packaging and establish how to optimise its car to get the most out of it.
Key, who has been eyeing 2019 since last December, says:
“We have been able to do a lot of development steps with Honda and discuss our priorities from a performance perspective. All that carries over to next year. Red Bull will get the reward of that and contribute to it as well.”
On paper, Red Bull and Honda looks extremely promising.
If it can turn that into genuine potential, there is every chance the two parties will succeed. That’s a big if, but Honda’s faced plenty of those already and emerged the other side. Three tough years with Mclaren left Honda well acquainted with disaster. With Red Bull, it looks ready to meet triumph once again.
“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same”