March 29, 2024

Honda CEO: F1 less relevant to Honda’s goals – “Poppycock!”

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TOKYO (Reuters) – Formula One’s growing restrictions have made the sport less attractive and reduced Honda’s incentive to rejoin a series it abandoned due to the global economic downturn, the company’s new chief executive said Monday. Honda withdrew backing for its under-performing team last December, only to see the same team, now under the Brawn name and Mercedes-Benz power, turn the outfit into championship leaders, and Japan’s second largest automaker said it would consider a return once it had recovered financially.

“It was a real shame that we had to leave Formula One,” Takanobu Ito, who took over as chief executive last month, told a media gathering in Tokyo. “On the other hand, F1 is becoming less of a medium in which companies can test their various strengths and more of an event with mounting restrictions. “There’s little room for us to challenge new fields, so bearing in mind the current state of series, I don’t think we have the desire to return, even if the economy improves.”

What a load of poppycock, or pappekak as the original expression goes. Honda failed horribly over the last few years by obvious mismanagement of a group of very talented people. The same people were very capable to suddenly, without Honda’s expert knowledge, build a race-winning car, despite the upheaval of having Honda pull out at the last minute, having to look for a new engine supplier, and operating on a severly tight budget.

It is darn obvious that the lnow-it-all Honda management has been responsible for wasting away multi millions of Dollars in the years before that. To now claim that Formula 1 is not relevant for Honda can therefore only really state that Honda does not feel itself capable of producing anything winning in F1, neither a car nor an engine. Honda obviously can only win in important series like Indy Racing and American Le Mans, where they are the only engine supplier. That guarantees they win every time, but does not show at all that they are capable of beating any renowned other brand.

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