How Honda restored its F1 reputation

Formula 1 changes very quickly, and a year is a very long time.

Surely, though, not long enough for anyone to have ever believed 12 months ago that, at the end of the 2018 season, Honda would be viewed as a potential deciding factor in the '19 world championship?

This year has been vital for Honda, which could have walked away from grand prix racing, tail between its legs, after three dismal seasons with McLaren. Instead it looked to Toro Rosso for redemption, in the hope that it could convince the team's parent operation Red Bull it was worth backing longer-term.

That target was very rapidly hit in 2018. Honda scored its best result since returning to F1, as Pierre Gasly's fourth-place finish in Bahrain - just the second race of the Toro Rosso-Honda partnership - eclipsed anything achieved with McLaren.

That was the peak in terms of results, but the good news kept coming.

In June, Honda brought an upgraded F1 engine to the Canadian Grand Prix that took it at least level with Renault and convinced Red Bull to make the change. Another upgrade, admittedly later than desired, appeared to lift the Japanese marque ahead of its French rival for the first time.

Yes, Honda used many more engines and components this season than any other and yes, Gasly suffered two failures during the final weekend in Abu Dhabi. Reliability is clearly not perfect. But it's better - "completely different" to 2017, reckons Honda technical director Toyoharu Tanabe - and the performance step is very real.

That means the bold targets set, aiming for redemption, were met. But Honda started the year unsure whether that would be the case, despite racking up the miles in a promising pre-season.

"It was very hard to set expectations for this season early this year because we had a new partner and we had a lot of failures and issues in past years," explains Tanabe.

"Our first priority was reliability for this season, and of course performance. It was still not perfect to understand what goes on at the track, that's why it's hard to expect this season and the position of the team. But we tried to finish with both cars! That was one of the priorities."

Honda appeared to have failed at the first hurdle when Gasly's season opener in Australia ended after only a few laps. The internal-combustion engine was damaged by a problem with the turbocharger and MGU-H.

At the time, Honda said it had modified those parts for the next race in Bahrain. The reality was that Honda had started the season with a 2017-specification MGU-H and could only introduce the latest version after Australia. That threat of unreliability for the opening round was always there, and explains why Honda was not too concerned in the aftermath and why Bahrain was so different.

Honda was not actually in as bad a shape as was being publicly made out in late-2017

"The first race we had a failure on Gasly's car that was hardware from last year," Tanabe admits.

"After that, from a reliability point of view, it improved reasonably. We had some unknown failures this year but we are comfortable with the reliability of the unit - it was completely different from previous years.

"We started with the first spec, updated it and again, so the gain of the [power-unit] performance was seen at the track, not only on the dyno. That was another good point of this year."

Tanabe is a key figure in the Honda revival. He was drafted in to the F1 project at the end of 2017 after spending several years leading the Honda Performance Development charge in IndyCar.

Former Honda F1 boss Yusuke Hasegawa's old role was split between Tanabe, at the track, and Yasuaki Asaki - a Honda engineering legend who had not worked in F1 since being part of the 1980s turbo engine project and was charged with running the Sakura research-and-development part of the operation.

Asaki was very good at making sure Sakura worked through a priority list and Tanabe's strength was not being blinded by the desire for performance and losing sight of the need for reliability.

Between them, the communication between trackside and Sakura improved, and Honda gradually focused more on what it needed to do, not just on what it wanted to do.

Usually, the sort of cultural change that Honda has gone through over the past year would take a bit longer to yield big benefits. What helped is that Honda was not actually in as bad a shape as was being publicly made out in late-2017. It cannot be forgotten that, during Honda's obvious and public struggles, McLaren twisted the knife by insisting how good its car was.

Without dwelling too much on something from early 2017, broadly speaking Honda's decision to switch to a Mercedes-style engine layout sparked a dismal pre-season of woeful unreliability that sowed the seeds for McLaren-Honda's divorce. But it also paved the way for a steep development curve.

"The biggest change with Toro Rosso is we had much better communication with the team compared to the past" Masahi Yamamoto

"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," outgoing Toro Rosso technical director James Key told Autosport mid-season.

"So, by the end of the year they were pretty good, 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."

The changes Honda made were so significant that, for the first time, it is preparing to use the same engine layout for a third season in a row - this year's engine is the basis for the '19 unit. With hindsight, it is easy to make out the turbulence Honda had to just buckle up and ride through. Fortunately, it had a very good new partner by its side, with which it was able to work closely.

"The biggest change with Toro Rosso is we had much better communication with the team compared to the past," says Honda motorsport boss Masashi Yamamoto, who oversaw the structural changes that helped convinced Red Bull that there was a tangible difference within the operation.

"As a result of that, we had a better connection between the chassis and power unit on the technical side. In terms of the engine itself, we were able to see the improvement of reliability and performance. We had Spec 2 and Spec 3 and improved the performance gradually.

"It was good preparation for next year. We had some troubles at the beginning of the year - reliability issues - and some delays on development, but in the end both reliability and performance improved."

Putting Honda's progress into numbers is difficult, given nobody is willing to share power gains and the like. But it has put a lot of effort into its combustion-engine technology this year, and also made decent gains with how it uses its energy-recovery systems.

Speed-trap figures can be misleading, but using F1's power-sensitive races at Spa and Monza as a point of comparison reveals that Honda trimmed its top-speed deficit year on year. Gasly followed up a top-10 finish in the Belgian GP by making it into the final part of Italian GP qualifying at Monza as Honda's engine stood up to the test of two of F1's fastest tracks.

As well as running the engines harder, Honda has also reacted to deficiencies exposed by the Azerbaijan GP earlier this season. It has since developed its energy-deployment strategy and adapted its communication between team and drivers. This combined to facilitate Honda's encouraging performance while it waited to introduce its final major upgrade.

That came in Japan in October - belatedly, and not without issue. It was meant to be used in Russia the weekend before but gearbox oscillations proved higher than expected. A rapid bit of calibration work in the days between races allowed the upgraded Honda to make its debut on home soil at Suzuka, where Brendon Hartley qualified sixth and Gasly made it two cars in the top 10. The performance gain was clear.

Further changes followed as Honda made more tweaks to introduce a proper solution to the oscillation troubles and then identified a possible assembly problem that proved to be a false alarm. By the end of the season few doubted that Honda had taken third spot in the engine pecking order from Renault, which introduced its own third-spec engine (although the works team avoided it because it came with a reliability warning).

Honda's progress, particularly its first step in June, was the final part of winning Red Bull over. It persevered with development over the course of the season, and even sacrificed Toro Rosso's race weekends to introduce minor amendments or tactically add fresh engines to the pool.

No stone was left unturned because it was all part of what 2018 represents for Honda: rehabilitation. That's why Yamamoto describes the rebuild of its reputation in just one year as "not really a big surprise".

"The key point was the race performance in Canada," he says. "We were able to prove we could step forward to a certain level and were able to get trust from Red Bull. After that, we were able to continue in that environment and Red Bull was also seeing that. I think the relationship is quite stable, good, and we are getting that trust."

Start as you mean to go on

Pierre Gasly rates his first full year in Formula 1 as 8.5 out of 10.

"Why? Because I think in my first complete season my main target was to make the best out of the package I had," he says.

"I knew there would be two, three, four opportunities in the season to score points, big points - I had to make sure that in these kind of moments I would be right there and be able to make them happen. And I think that's what I did."

He's not wrong. As well as banking Honda's best result since returning to F1, with fourth place in Bahrain, Gasly scored big twice more before the summer break - he was seventh in Monaco and sixth in Hungary. But Toro Rosso's general lack of car progress prevented big hits in the second part of the season.

"Bahrain, Monaco, Budapest, I would say they were the main three ones where we managed to do the right thing," says Gasly.

"In Bahrain we had to deliver a good qualifying at the right time to have the free air in the race and that's what I managed to do. In Monaco we had to make it into the Q3, better starting grid position, that's what we did.

"In the wet in Budapest in quali, I managed to make it to Q3 and have a good starting position. They were the races where we had a bit more performance compared to others and we managed to make it happen when it mattered."

Gasly learned of his promotion to the Red Bull senior team over the summer break, following Daniel Ricciardo's shock decision to leave for Renault. While the big results stopped after that, there were still highlights - like a gutsy drive to ninth in Belgium, and nicking a point in Mexico. He should have had a point in Britain too, but lost it because he was judged to have been too aggressive in battle.

Ultimately, Gasly was the better of the two Toro Rosso drivers. But Brendon Hartley did run him close in qualifying and Gasly may need to step up a gear to stand a chance against Max Verstappen at Red Bull.