What next for Honda?

Published 04/27/2017, 2:34 PM EDT

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The news was out. McLaren decided to end championship winning collaboration with Mercedes and form the championship winning collaboration with Honda for the 2015 season. It was a joy for the fans who saw Alain Prost or Ayrton Senna race while it was a mixed, undecided emotion for people who watched David Coulthard or Mika Hakkinen fly on the track. But there was one general consensus, the past glory of McLaren-Honda was going to be revived.

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Honda made a comeback to Formula 1 but not in the style everyone was hoping for. At the first race in Australia, 2009 World Champion Jenson Button saw his McLaren lapped twice by the leading cars on race day. At the end of the 2015 season, McLaren-Honda saw itself 9th in the constructors championship with only Manor below them. In response to this dreadful performance, Honda took action and changed the structure of the technical team. McLaren-Honda saw a good climb of 3 positions as they closed the 2016 championship in 6th place. It was projected that in the third year of the partnership, the team will be back with all guns blazing. But with 4 DNF, 1 DNS in 3 races, the glory days look like a distant dream.

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The last two seasons and the first three races of this season are no advertisement for Honda. The engine is constantly riddled with vibration problems which makes it unreliable and painfully slow. Honda constantly reassures that they are close to a solution but two championships and three races in, all hopes are drying up fast. Even Alonso is now looking forward to the triple-crown rather than a formula 1 championship. So there is clearly a lack of morale at McLaren and McLaren-Honda partnership looks thorny.

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With all this bad publicity, it will be safe for Honda to assume that if performance stays limited, their current stint in Formula 1 is going to be short. In this troubled times, they need to find additional consumers in Formula 1. Though discussions with Sauber do raise hope, Honda still has to see that Sauber is actually the only team which is non-competitive this season, standing right next to McLaren. Sauber can not go any lower than this, so if Honda magically does great in the coming season, the former can only gain from it, never lose out. So while this deal can prove to be a great deal for Sauber, how does it show-case Honda?

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It can be argued that in the 80s and early 90s, Honda used to supply their power units to smaller teams and that is how they made it into the big ones. But the situation today is very different from then. Honda kept multiple power units on sale. While the smaller teams got a little underpowered ones, the big guns bought bigger guns. Also, Honda went from being a small team supplier to big team supplier, that is just good business and great brand value. But going from a big team supplier, breaking that team’s momentum in the process, to a small team supplier just might have the opposite affect on brand value.

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Looking at Honda’s history at the sport though, the company’s exit from the sport is more likely. Honda has constantly re-entered and exited from Formula 1 and unless the company strengthens its partnership with multiple teams, this just might be their shortest stint.

 

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Written by:

Aayush Mittal

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