Honda - another disaster ?

[Order66]

Some Gump said:

To come in now and try to compete, you'd have to be mad in the heed. Honda aren't muppets, it's just the bar is so high. TVR once thought making their own engine was doable, it bankrupted em.

Surely it would be a cosworth engine though and not a McLaren home-brew from scratch? I believe Zak Brown is on the board of Cosworth and I can imagine the PR response would be good for a McLaren Cosworth. I thought cosworth said they were 6 months away from a competitive engine if they got the funding.

[DanielSan]

Order66 said:

Surely it would be a cosworth engine though and not a McLaren home-brew from scratch? I believe Zak Brown is on the board of Cosworth and I can imagine the PR response would be good for a McLaren Cosworth. I thought cosworth said they were 6 months away from a competitive engine if they got the funding.

If they'd said that in in 2016 they're now 18 months away from a competitive engine, I'd hazard a guess they haven't continued to develop an idea that is unlikely to happen so they'd need to do a whole load of catching up. That'd put them into 2020 before getting the engine racing properly, and with a rule change in 2021 it's a none option, as it is for any other manufacturer.

That is just using beer mat maths though.

[Some Gump]

Order66 said:

Surely it would be a cosworth engine though and not a McLaren home-brew from scratch? I believe Zak Brown is on the board of Cosworth and I can imagine the PR response would be good for a McLaren Cosworth. I thought cosworth said they were 6 months away from a competitive engine if they got the funding.

We all think of Coswarth as being the tour de force of 1984. In reality, their last F1 engine was st. Their last LMP1 engine (ironically badged as Nismo) was good but in a donkey. Was it good enough to beat 'yota Audi and Porsche? We'll never know. To hang all your hopes on someone that did an average at best job last time is pretty much identical to hanging that hat on Honda- who last became world champs by bailing and getting Mercedes power in their car =(

[anonymous-user]

If Honda can get a deal with TR, that is the best route. Red Bull would ultimately sell the team to Honda, who could then gain the marketing benefit of being a top team in their own right (assuming they could achieve it, see Brawn).

It would be a rescue of the engine programme costs.

[spunkytherabbit]

janesmith1950 said:

If Honda can get a deal with TR, that is the best route. Red Bull would ultimately sell the team to Honda, who could then gain the marketing benefit of being a top team in their own right (assuming they could achieve it, see Brawn).

It would be a rescue of the engine programme costs.

I don't think that is what would happen. Red Bull the parent company don't need to sell TR. They can bank roll two teams on liquid cash alone and if TR was a liability they would have sold it at cut price or written it off as a loss before now. If the deal for Honda to go to TR happens it is because Red Bull are taking a risk free gamble to get a works engine in 2019. Put it in TR for 2018 to let Honda sort their st out and cherry pick it in 2019 or 2020 when it comes good, cutting a customer deal or old spec Honda for TR. Then looking attractive for a new works deal from someone when the engine format changes for 2022.

And if Honda keep on making a dog it's of no consequence. RB still get their young driver feeder route any way round and they stick with Renault and trade on previous reputation to try and remain attractive for a 2022 works spec engine. A no zero sum game for Red Bull either outcome.

TR do as they are told. Red bull do what is best for red bull. Not to rescue Honda.

Edited by spunkytherabbit on Wednesday 6th September 13:05

[anonymous-user]

TR has been up for sale for years, if the correct offer arrived they would sell. Its not as daft an idea as it may sound if Honda want another team, especially if the new engine regs bring back some sense to the design required.

[Jinba Ittai]

Some Gump said:

Jinba Ittai said:

That could lead to a huge problem then as Renault have stated they won't supply an extra team. This whole thing is a complete fk up. If I were McLaren I'd stick with Honda, fk Alonso out the building, take Sainz or Kubica as replacement and get a plan in place now to start making their own engines from 2021.

That's why you're not in charge =)

What's the budget to make a new engine? 250m? That gets you to 4-5 years ago. To come in now and try to compete, you'd have to be mad in the heed. Honda aren't muppets, it's just the bar is so high. TVR once thought making their own engine was doable, it bankrupted em.

The point is that with the new engine regs, it will be cheaper and simpler than the current generation, thus attracting new engine manufacturers in. And, has been mentioned,it wouldn't be McLaren starting from scratch, but a similar relationship Mercedes had with Ilmor, possibly with Ricardo or Cosworth.......

[NRS]

Order66 said:

Some Gump said:

To come in now and try to compete, you'd have to be mad in the heed. Honda aren't muppets, it's just the bar is so high. TVR once thought making their own engine was doable, it bankrupted em.

Surely it would be a cosworth engine though and not a McLaren home-brew from scratch? I believe Zak Brown is on the board of Cosworth and I can imagine the PR response would be good for a McLaren Cosworth. I thought cosworth said they were 6 months away from a competitive engine if they got the funding.

6 months is almost certainly nonsense. Just look how long it has taken Renault, Ferrari and Honda to develop their engines in 'varying' levels of competitiveness. In addition, look at the costs. No way Cosworth have been developing their own engine without a deal as it's a huge amount of cash. Easy to say something like that for PR when you know it won't be tested.

[Vaud]

NRS said:

Order66 said:

Some Gump said:

To come in now and try to compete, you'd have to be mad in the heed. Honda aren't muppets, it's just the bar is so high. TVR once thought making their own engine was doable, it bankrupted em.

Surely it would be a cosworth engine though and not a McLaren home-brew from scratch? I believe Zak Brown is on the board of Cosworth and I can imagine the PR response would be good for a McLaren Cosworth. I thought cosworth said they were 6 months away from a competitive engine if they got the funding.

6 months is almost certainly nonsense. Just look how long it has taken Renault, Ferrari and Honda to develop their engines in 'varying' levels of competitiveness. In addition, look at the costs. No way Cosworth have been developing their own engine without a deal as it's a huge amount of cash. Easy to say something like that for PR when you know it won't be tested.

Agree. There is no way the board of Cosworth would allow a speculative investment of £100M's without a locked in customer or 3. These engines are massively, massively complex. The rumour is that Mercedes have spent >€500M so far on dev for the engine alone.

Now one way out for Renault or Honda might be the Cosworth or Ilmor branding option - a "tuned" variant of the engine,

[Jabbah]

jsf said:

Honda had nothing stopping them doing as much R&D as they wanted to do, the token system didn't stop them experimenting with anything.

Apart from budget. Do they pump as much of their budget as they can into optimising the parts they are actually going to use under the token system or waste it on some R&D that was never going to be used as it outside the rules? It has always been the case that F1 teams and engine manufacturers pump the money into areas within [their interpretation of] the rules. Vast amounts of money is spent extracting the tiniest of performance improvements within those rules. Nobody is going to waste money outside of that to design something that can't be used due to the current rules.

jsf said:

They decided late in the day that they had to scrap the current engine because they realised they would never be competitive with it.

That realisation probably came very early, however it wasn't until the rules were changed late in the day that they were allowed to develop a new design. Until that rule change they had to stick with the current basic design, so what would have been the point of doing R&D on something they wouldn't have been able to use?

jsf said:

I think its far more likely the reason the token system was abandoned was because Honda told the working group they have to scrap the concept and start again, and they will do it or walk away from the sport.

That may be the case but your original premise was flawed and had no evidence to back it up. The fact remains that Honda's original basic design was fatally flawed and the token system prevented them changing that design until the rules were changed. Until that rule change was confirmed there would have been very little budget to start designing a new concept.

[HustleRussell]

I'm sure the limiting factor for Honda is no longer the basic principle, budget, regulations nor talent; the biggest limiting factor they face is the lead time associated with developing and testing the next update. There are 20 races this season, a race every 1.8 weeks on average, at every one of those races some element of the PU sts itself prematurely and every component problem with is identified will take several weeks to turn around. I'm speculating now but I sense that a significant proportion of the Honda team spends all season fighting fires and rushing through redesign and re-engineering work in an effort to keep the cars from stopping and this ties up engineering and manufacturing resources which would otherwise be developing thoroughly engineered and analysed performance upgrades.

If you have ever had the misfortune of working in an underperforming company or project environment, and you are being flamed from all sides and shat on from great height with people demanding immediate resolution, whole departments start running around like headless chickens.

The way that cycle is broken is though notifying that deadlines are going to be missed, drawing breath, having open and constructive discussions at a corporate level and coming up with a new strategy.

However, if I may make a slightly risky comment based on my own experience- Asian companies / contractors are especially bad at doing the above (laying cards on the table, admitting defeat when it comes to schedules / deadlines, re-focussing on the big picture) and will collectively become a pressure cooker within which people will work themselves half to death in a vain effort to produce adequate work to an impossible schedule. In this scenario, quality suffers first.

[Flooble]

The thing is, did Honda not already do the "draw breath and admit defeat" when they redesigned the entire engine for 2017 based on seeing what everyone else did in 2015/6? They have had a year (2016) to get their redesigned engine right, with the benefit of seeing what everyone else came up with in 2015.

You are almost certainly right that large amounts of effort are being soaked up in trying to patch up this year's design, but short of them saying "Okay, we screwed up this design as well, let's start again for 2019" I don't see where else they can go ...

[spunkytherabbit]

jsf said:

TR has been up for sale for years, if the correct offer arrived they would sell. Its not as daft an idea as it may sound if Honda want another team, especially if the new engine regs bring back some sense to the design required.

That's true and I should have qualified my point a little better. Which was that Red Bull control the decision. TR have no say and it is about the position they can get the RBR team into by putting the Honda engine into TR (or not), and nothing else.

Selling TR for a better price as a result of having a functional Honda engine in the back would be a bonus I suspect and if they really needed to have disposed of TR before now they would have done. Mateschitz even admitted he keeps ownership of TR because it suits him to and will do so for as long as it does.

That the Honda talks have started is to serve RBR racing though, and for no other reason.

[anonymous-user]

spunkytherabbit said:

That the Honda talks have started is to serve RBR racing though, and for no other reason.

That's very unlikely to be true.

In the first instance, RBR only exists to serve whatever purpose its owner has for it. If the marketing benefit can be improved by spending outside of F1, Red Bull will apportion the spend approriately. They may have been (unfairly) criticised in some corners for being 'just a drinks company', however that's what they are and it's not all done for fun. RBR is not the end goal foe Red Bull, the beneficial owner of RBR is.

Secondly, TR are just another asset of RB. As nice as it is having the additional facility and all that goes with it, TR is there to serve RB and not RBR. DM has been open to selling TR for some time. That it hasn't sold is likely down to the severity of engine costs now, the difficulty in getting a competetive PU and uncertainty in the rules/expenditure for the medium term. In other words, a lack of buyers willing to provide DM with a return he would see as good value. He's not short of money, so doesn't need to rush into a sale that doesn't suit him.

Lastly, the Honda deal makes sense on a number of levels. No doubt it provides RBR a window to test the progress of Honda without risking its own neck. It also gives RBR leverage against Renault, as unlike Mercedes and Ferrari, Honda would not be afraid of selling PUs to a competetive outfit. DM would gain favour and a favour by helping keep Honda in F1, which he may get back to help RBR later in the day. Notwithstanding Honda are likely to put significant funding into the team full stop. RB would get Far East exposure at a low cost.

For Honda, it's an obvious route to allow the prior expenditure to be justified by going racing with the results. It would have greater influence and less pressure than at McLaren and, unlike McLaren, if they gain traction and begin to find success, the option is on the table to put their name on the whole package in a smooth transition.

As much as Honda have cocked up this time, they have unfinished business in F1 from 1999 and 2009- maybe 2019 is the year they crack it?

[MissChief]

Flooble said:

The thing is, did Honda not already do the "draw breath and admit defeat" when they redesigned the entire engine for 2017 based on seeing what everyone else did in 2015/6? They have had a year (2016) to get their redesigned engine right, with the benefit of seeing what everyone else came up with in 2015.

You are almost certainly right that large amounts of effort are being soaked up in trying to patch up this year's design, but short of them saying "Okay, we screwed up this design as well, let's start again for 2019" I don't see where else they can go ...

The complete re-do of the whole design once they dropped the McLaren mandated 'size zero' concept has effectively put them back by a year to eighteen months. This means they're now two or three years behind where Mercedes, Ferrari and Renault are. If, as has been said, Mercedes had already been working on the new engine for three years or more prior to its launch no doubt they were having these sorts of issues, just on the dyno, not on the racetrack. Honda were certainly very ambitious, extremely so to expect to come up with an engine in eighteen months or less, given their complexity, but much if that isn't Honda's fault directly and only now are they on the right track with their layout. People need to give Honda some slack I feel.

The next update, due st Suzuka, is the one that Mario Ilien has had most input on so we will see what this brings.

[StevieBee]

MissChief said:

The next update, due st Suzuka, is the one that Mario Ilien has had most input on so we will see what this brings.

I think this will be the cruncher and - I hope - the turning point.

It's a widely held view that the cause of the issue is the Japanese / Honda culture of inward development; development and problem solving sourced from within rather than bring in external expertise, a move that in their culture they see as more damaging than the problem itself.

[eliot]

They need to learn how to bend or interpret rules - I doubt they would of spent time figuring out how to burn oil as fuel.

[Gary C]

MissChief said:

The complete re-do of the whole design once they dropped the McLaren mandated 'size zero' concept has effectively put them back by a year to eighteen months. This means they're now two or three years behind where Mercedes, Ferrari and Renault are.

People need to give Honda some slack I feel.

The next update, due st Suzuka, is the one that Mario Ilien has had most input on so we will see what this brings.

But on day one, Merc, Ferrari and Renault didn't fail at almost every opportunity did they ?

Of course there is the desperation to keep up that may mean they have had to push nearer to their lower limits, but come on, it's been a disaster.

Is phase 4 fully released at the next race ? I do hope it works.

[mycool]

Wasn't one of the major issues that they were proving the technology (especially for the ICE part of the engine) using single cylinder models. These are typically used to prove concepts and the type that universities, etc use for research. When they then put 6 of these in a V with the other parts they found it shook itself to pieces.

Only recently have they apparently started dyno-ing full engines which could explain the apparent lack of progress as I'd assumed they'd have several iterations of a design or fix to an issue revving its nuts off 24/7 on a bank of dynos or as others have mentioned in test mules pounding around a track somewhere.

[ralphrj]

mycool said:

Wasn't one of the major issues that they were proving the technology (especially for the ICE part of the engine) using single cylinder models. These are typically used to prove concepts and the type that universities, etc use for research. When they then put 6 of these in a V with the other parts they found it shook itself to pieces.

I can definitely recall reading that Ferrari used single cylinder prototypes for their F1 engines but this was probably back in the 2.4 litre V8 era. Possible that they have a better understanding of the problems that can occur moving from a single cylinder prototype to a full, multi cylinder engine.