Honda announces new F1 base in UK
Feel like you'd be good at stripping down a Formula 1 powertrain? Right this way...
Are you an engineer or technician working in F1? Are you still at your desk ahead of Easter weekend and feeling mildly disgruntled about it? Well, good news: Honda is so serious about its (sort of) return to the world’s flagship motorsport that it creating an entirely new subsidiary called Honda Racing Corporation UK Ltd. And from springtime this year, it’ll be looking for qualified people to work there.
Where will they be based, you cry. Well, Honda doesn’t make that clear in its slender release on the subject, but on the basis that it is establishing the new facility chiefly to support its partnership with Aston Martin F1, you’d imagine that it wouldn’t want to be too far away from Silverstone. But we could be wrong. Its secondary job is to operate as a logistics operation for the entire European region. So you’d imagine exemplary transport links would be high on the list, too.
Why now? Well, that’s a good question. Honda might have been in F1 for 60 years (yep, really) but its involvement has occasionally resembled a nervous rabbit at the edge of its burrow. So while it’s been doing a bang-up job providing ‘technical support’ to Red Bull, it was at one point going to be leaving the sport entirely. Then, for various complicated reasons involving rule changes and market conditions and politics and popularity, it decided that was a silly idea.
Consequently, the complicated business of prepping and maintaining ‘Honda-built F1 power units (PUs)’ is set to become a lot more involved as the manufacturer jumps back into business with both feet. The powertrain deal it signed with Aston Martin last year is due to take effect in The-Times-They-Are-a-Changin 2026 season - so there’s plenty to do before then. Including finding the right people to do all the prepping and maintaining. And finding the right people to support them while they do it. Which is potentially great news for the lucky few reading this, not to mention UK plc generally. More when we have it.
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