Honda's so-called legacy is bad for F1

Back in May 2013, while still McLaren CEO eight months before the boardroom coup in which he was ousted by Ron Dennis, Martin Whitmarsh welcomed Honda's return to Formula 1 as the engine and technology partner to the team with which it had dominated in the late eighties.

"The names of McLaren and Honda are synonymous with success in Formula 1, and, for everyone who works for both companies, the weight of our past achievements together lies heavily on our shoulders," he said.

"But it's a mark of the ambition and resolve we both share that we want once again to take McLaren-Honda to the very pinnacle of Formula 1 success.

"Together we have a great legacy - and we're utterly committed to maintaining it."

The legacy he spoke of was founded upon those halcyon 1988-92 seasons, when the McLaren-Honda partnership scored 44 victories from 53 pole positions, primarily via Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost.

The stand-out season was, of course, 1988, when McLaren-Honda won 15 of 16 grands prix, being beaten only by Gerhard Berger's Ferrari at Monza after an impetuous Senna crudely collided with backmarker Jean-Louis Schlesser.

These statistics, impressive as they may be, cloud some crucial aspects. In 1988 only six teams were turbo-powered - McLaren, Ferrari, Lotus, Arrows, Zakspeed and Osella - and that Camel-funded Lotus, with identical Hondas and triple champion Nelson Piquet on-board, scored but three third places and placed fifth in the constructors' classification, behind McLaren, Ferrari, Benetton (Ford V8) and Arrows (customer Megatron-badged BMW).

This suggests that Gordon Murray's 'lowline' McLaren MP4/4 design, facilitated by an exclusive three-shaft Weismann transmission that permitted a lowered drivetrain, provided the winning edge over Ferrari and made the difference between first and fifth - rather than simply Honda power.

That said, there is no disputing that Honda's 1988 V6 RA168-E 80-degree turbo was the class of the field that year, but so it should have been, particularly as direct competition during that last turbo season was thin. The engine itself was based on a naturally-aspirated 1982 Formula 2 'toe-in-the-water' design built for Spirit, and converted to F1 turbo specification for 1983.

Late that same season McLaren and TAG introduced their Porsche-designed turbo power unit, which immediately won three championships on the trot before TAG cut spending for 1987, after which McLaren moved to Honda, which had decided to part company with Williams. Honda's decision came despite Williams winning both 1987 titles with Piquet (and Nigel Mansell).

As an aside, Honda's first turbo victory came in the engine's 17th race, whereas BMW (champion in 1983 with a Murray-designed Brabham) and TAG were victorious in their fourth attempts each. Mercedes won its first F1 grand prix, back in July 1954.

McLaren partnered Honda from 1988 to 1992, adding a further 29 wins during the four naturally aspirated seasons that followed their only turbo year together.

A definite drop-off in strike-rate is discernible, and by 1991 the partnership was under threat from Williams-Renault.

After the death of Sochiro Honda in August 1991, McLaren was given notice of Honda's exit from F1 at the end of '92.

McLAREN-HONDA VICTORIES 1988-92

The company returned in 1999 with a test chassis designed by Dallara (tested by Jos Verstappen, father of Max), but the plug was almost immediately pulled following the unexpected death of chief engineer Harvey Postlethwaite, with the engines then supplied to BAR from 2000 onwards. In 2004 Honda acquired a 45% stake in the Brackley-based team, taking full control a year later.

At the end of 2008 Honda withdrew (again) - having won just one grand prix via Jenson Button - ostensibly due to the global economic crisis, handing the team to Ross Brawn and his fellow directors. They acquired Mercedes engines and dominated the early part of the 2009 season with the Brackley team via Button and Rubens Barrichello before selling to Mercedes, which walked the 2014-6 seasons.

Where is this heading? Simply to prove that, rather than having a strong F1 legacy, Honda enjoyed a spectacular 1986-92 period, with the before/after campaigns being utterly disappointing.

For proof look no further than the 1964/5 seasons, when Honda won a single grand prix - and Richie Ginther his only - in Mexico only after the 1965 gold standard (Jim Clark and the Lotus 33) retired, as did Graham Hill and Jackie Stewart, and two contenders crashed.

For further proof look to Honda's next project: having sat out 1966, the first year of F1's 3.0-litre formula, in order to develop its engine, Honda signed 1964 champion John Surtees for 1967/8.

In 23 grands prix he non-started twice, retired a dozen times, scored points seven times (one win, three podiums) - with victory in the 1967 Italian Grand Prix occurring only after Clark dropped out of the lead twice due to mechanical issues.

In 1968 the company experimented with a (heavy) water-cooled V12-powered car, built by Lola after Surtees declared Honda's chassis wanting, and an air-cooled V8 car that the multiple two-wheel world champion refused to drive. It was entered in the French Grand Prix for Jo Schlesser, who crashed and died after its magnesium-alloy chassis ignited. Honda withdrew at the season's end.

Again, not a scintillating record. Indeed, Honda's 1983-1992 campaign, variously with Spirit, Williams, Lotus and McLaren, serves as a high point in the company's F1 history, and it can be no coincidence that all Honda's victories bar one - Button's 2006 Hungarian Grand Prix win in wet/dry conditions of the type suited to the Briton's silky-smooth style - occurred during campaigns initiated and driven by the company founder.

In summary: Honda-powered cars had won 71 grands prix by the end of the 1992 season (and one since) - 69 of them as an engine supplier between 1983 and 1992 - plus Button's 2006 win.

Williams scored 23 wins from 75 Honda-powered races and Lotus two from its 32 races with Honda, while McLaren provided 44 wins from 80 starts. From a total of 384 starts, Honda won 72 grands prix for a 18.75% strike rate.

There can be little doubt that having his surname on the tappet covers meant that an element of personal pride (and budgetary leniency) was involved, while Mr Honda made no secret of the fact that he viewed racing - whether on two wheels or four - as primarily an engineering research activity, whereas all Honda's subsequent F1 programmes have been marketing led.

Indeed, it is telling to study company records: the entrant for the 1964/5 and 1967/8 campaigns was Honda R&D Company, whereas subsequent entrants were either Lucky Strike Honda F1 Team or Honda F1 Team. Just what Sochiro would have made of the team's 2007 'Earth Dreams' livery one shudders to think.

No reference can be made to Honda's F1 history without including Mugen: started by Toshio Honda, son of the company founder, the brand was regularly used as a 'skunkworks' operation whenever Honda did not wish to be directly linked to a project or campaign. Add in the 147 starts made by Mugen-Honda engines, and the total rises to 531 grands prix for 72 wins, or a strike rate of just 13.5%.

Compare this figure with Ferrari's strike rate of 22.8% - despite the Scuderia's many lean years - from 227 wins in 933 starts, or Renault's strike rate of almost one win in every three races (29.2% from 170 wins in 582 starts).

So while Honda's overall performance is acceptable by some standards, it remains way off that of Mercedes, which has won 35% of the 422 grands prix its engines have contested to date.

The question, then, is why has Honda, despite being by a considerable margin the world's largest engine manufacturer with an estimated 15 million units built per annum, not cracked F1 save for that halcyon McLaren eighties period, the reasons for which have been identified?

More pertinently, why has Honda spectacularly failed to make a fist of the hybrid era despite having first introduced a hybrid passenger car, the Insight, in 1999?

This suggests a distinct lack of commitment by Honda's marketing executives towards hybrid technology. Forget not that they fund the F1 programme, not R&D budgets as in former years.

Another pointer is Honda's massive push to hydrogen fuel cells with the Clarity - a family-sized car whose power unit is about as far removed from current F1 engine technology as are diesel engines - which Honda sees as the future.

Contrast that with Mercedes, whose executives are absolutely committed to hybrid road cars, or Renault, whose CEO Carlos Ghosn was persuaded to re-acquire the (Lotus) F1 team he had previously sold off on the basis of F1's hybrid regulations. Indeed, the company has threatened to exit F1 should it revert to 'simple' engines.

Possibly the key to Honda's issues can be found in a another excerpt from Whitmarsh's 2013 speech: "Honda has built a reputation as a worldwide engineering giant, but its roots, its specialism and its passion lie in the advancement of the internal combustion engine.

"Throughout its history, Honda pioneered engine technology...its experience as a manufacturer of turbocharged engines is unequalled by any other car manufacturer currently competing in Formula 1."

Such words may have rung true in, say, 1988, but in the intervening two decades F1 technology had moved on.

The current engines are not simply internal combustion engines with bolt-on KERS units as Honda experimented with in preparation for the 2009 season it ultimately did not contest, nor even 1980s-style turbo engines with hybrid assistance.

The current crop of power units are fully integrated packages in which turbochargers fulfil virtually as much energy recovery function as do brake-by-wire rear axles, with full quota energy deployment being key to fast lap times.

Despite having started work on its design well before Whitmarsh made his announcement - or so logic dictates - Honda singularly failed to integrate its turbo, internal combustion unit, MGU-H, MGU-K and battery storage.

For this situation to continue, as it has since 2015, there is simply no excuse, and points to a total lack of executive commitment to F1. Indeed, a McLaren insider, speaking on account of anonymity, recently told Autosport that the 2017 engine has less power than the original units supplied to the team in '15 - despite three years' development, a wholesale change at the top of the project, and unfreezing of engine regulations.

The latest initiative, if paddock talk is to be believed, is that Honda has turned (or will turn) to Mercedes for technical assistance.

That Honda, the great Honda, needs to turn to a fellow competitor in order to lift itself off the back row of grids (or enable both cars to take a grand prix start this season) is a slap in the face of that so-called legacy, and speaks volumes.

The company's abject failure to master an engineering project that delivered victory after victory for Mercedes and, recently, Ferrari, has arguably frightened off further manufacturers by providing their board members ready excuses to not sign off F1 projects. After all, "if Honda can't make it work, we can't risk it..."

Instead board members at Volkswagen and Hyundai and Toyota should remove Honda's eighties peaks from the equation, then say: "We are not surprised that Honda cannot cut the mustard - look at its F1 history over the years. We can succeed, just as Mercedes, Ferrari and Renault have done," then formulate plans to enter Formula 1 from 2020 onwards.

On the basis of its present performance, Honda would not be missed.