Why was Honda so uncompetitive in 2007 and 2008?

[DOCG]

They had a great inaugural season in 2006 after buying the team from British American Tobacco (and Jenson got his first F1 win!) but then the 2007 and 2008 seasons were really pathetic despite any large regulation changes, even sometimes being beaten by Super Aguri.

How could they go from challenging for race wins to only scoring a handful of points in the entire season? Did the loss of BAT sponsorship really hit them that hard or am I missing something?

[DanielSan]

The car design was a cockup that was then made worse by the chassis/aero teams and the Honda engine guys having 2 completely separate objectives. The engine side wanted over 1000bhp regardless of packaging which they didn't achieve due to the aero restrictions on cooling and as a result reliability. While the chassis/aero team wanted a more compact engine and cooling setup to be more efficient with the aero and make up for the sligbt power defecit

Basically it's the ultimate example of what happens when 2 groups fail to communicate and compromise. Ross Brawn went into the full story on his interview on the Motorsport Magazine podcast I think it was a while ago.

Edited by DanielSan on Tuesday 25th August 12:19

[DOCG]

DanielSan said:

The car design was a cockup that was then made worse by the chassis/aero teams and the Honda engine guys having 2 completely separate objectives. The engine side wanted over 1000bhp regardless of packaging which they didn't achieve due to the aero restrictions on cooling and as a result reliability. While the chassis/aero team wanted a more compact engine and cooling setup to be more efficient with the aero and make up for the sligbt power defecit

Basically it's the ultimate example of what happens when 2 groups fail to communicate and compromise. Ross Braun went into the full story on his interview on the Motorsport Magazine podcast I think it was a while ago.

I found the podcast you are referring to, Brawn and Fry go into fascinating detail about how Brawn GP came about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReVb5P0mdds

[entropy]

They managed to build a crap car for 2007. It was so bad that the previous year's car raced by Super Aguri in 2007 was quicker!

They had a brand new wind tunnel and turned out it wasn't calibrated properly. Also, IIRC, the car was overweight because of rigidity problems.

Honda didn't have much confidence with Brackley. Geoff Willis was sacked with HRC/MotoGP boss Shuhei Nakamoto shoehorned in as technical director.

Honda F1 project was a revolving door of Japanese engineers as an academy for the car division. This wasn't taken kindly even this sort of thing happens in other car companies - Merc-AMG being a prime example - but IIRC it was to do with chassis side of things.

DanielSan said:

The engine side wanted over 1000bhp regardless of packaging which they didn't achieve due to the aero restrictions on cooling and as a result reliability.

I remember post from a PHer who worked at BAR/Honda F1 who said the cars were capable running at full wick but Honda specifically wanted to run them conservatively.

[DanielSan]

entropy said:

I remember post from a PHer who worked at BAR/Honda F1 who said the cars were capable running at full wick but Honda specifically wanted to run them conservatively.

A pretty big ask that one really. I'm not sure anyone was managing that. The 1000bhp number always seemed to be mentioned in conjunction with the words 'in qualifying'

[entropy]

DanielSan said:

A pretty big ask that one really. I'm not sure anyone was managing that. The 1000bhp number always seemed to be mentioned in conjunction with the words 'in qualifying'

It was only at the tailend of the V10 era were 3.5L NA F1 engines ever able to break 1000bhp.

The V8s from 2006 to the PU era saw reduced power (700-800bhp to begin with) and rev limits were introduced - 19k rpm to begin with and then lowered over time.