“GP2 engine!” – Honda F1 boss Masashi Yamamoto goes back in time to illustrate how their successful association with the Red Bull family commenced.
Honda had a hugely unsuccessful stint as an engine provider with McLaren from 2015-17, resulting in no wins or poles. This led Honda’s F1 managing director Masashi Yamamoto and his team to make a call to call off their association with the British team.
As McLaren was the only team the Japanese major was serving at the time, it would have meant them taking a sabbatical from the sport. But Franz Tost, the team principal of Toro Rosso/AlphaTauri convinced Yamamoto to take a shot with the Red Bull family.
The meetings bore fruit, and Honda partnered with Toro Rosso for the 2018 season, before also partnering with sister team Red Bull from the following season. And with Max Verstappen’s victory this season, the rest, as they say, is history…
“It was the first time I couldn’t really feel any hope for the future. Some of the board members said ‘why do we continue this? Why don’t we quit?’
“I thought that might also be for the best. We were not able to imagine we were fighting for a championship like this. There was no light.
It was actually Franz Tost who said Honda can do it.
“He spoke to board members and said we have to continue, to recover. Before talking to Helmut [Marko], we talked to Franz a little bit.
“With McLaren, they said ‘we take care of the politics and everything, so you just focus on making engines’. That was the role. So we stepped in a little bit more after starting with Red Bull.
“The change for myself is that after starting with Toro Rosso, Franz said ‘you should speak to F1, you should speak to the FIA’.
“Even if we had continued with the McLaren project, I don’t really think we could have been successful, nor McLaren either.
“The biggest reason probably is the shape we started wasn’t really right. So the project needs to be started with the right shape or communication, which we could not with McLaren.
That’s something we could have done with Red Bull Racing and Toro Rosso. That was very key. We started from zero. That was a restart, and we needed it.”
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