Honda will exit the sport of Formula 1 on a high, having seen their power units lead Red Bull and Max Verstappen to a driver's title in 2021.
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When Max Verstappen won the 2021 Formula 1 world championship, it was a triumph not only for Red Bull but also their engine partners Honda.
Honda had returned to the sport in 2015 as engine partners to McLaren. The hope then was that they’d recreate their iconic partnership of the late 1980s.
However, the three year partnership was a disaster of epic proportions. And when McLaren chose to end the deal, Honda could only partner with Red Bull’s sister team Toro Rosso.
But the partnership saw the Japanese manufacturer produce better power units. As such, a deal with Red Bull came about and it ended with a world championship win in 2021.
This of course raised the obvious question: did the partnership end too soon? That’s certainly what motorsport boss Masashi Yamamoto believes.
“Personally yes, I agree,” he told Autosport.
“But this is obviously a company decision and I understand which way the company wants to go, so in the end we have to accept that.
“But we always have the imagination, so we hope one day Honda will return to F1.”
Yamamoto added that Honda’s departure helped the team fight harder in the quest for a championship in the 2021 season.
“Of course it is sad, but we knew this from last October 2020 and therefore we knew that we had to push for it in 2021,” he said.
“We took a different mindset and looked at the decision in a different way. We tried to give everything to perform in the time that we had still left.”
Honda will, in one way, stay on in F1. Red Bull has purchased their power unit set-up and rebranded it as Red Bull Power Trains. This means, in effect, Red Bull will be producing their own engines from next season onwards – using Honda’s expertise in the area.
It is quite the upturn of fortunes for the Japanese-based team, who in 2018 looked all but done with the sport. Their return to F1 in 2015 onwards had been disastrous.
Then-McLaren driver Fernando Alonso publicly criticised the engines, even referring to them as “GP2 engines” in a radio rant.
The partnership was dropped, but they signed on to supply engines to Toro Rosso. Red Bull eventually chose to drop Renault and sign on full-time with Honda.
Their cars would eventually improve and in 2021 they were able to win their first world title in 8 years.
