Honda unveils Aston F1 engine, confirms Type R HRC

Fed up with Honda's turgid lineup? Well, it promises to 'leverage' its return to F1 for the better...

By PH Staff / Wednesday, 21 January 2026 / Loading comments

Formula One, in case you hadn’t noticed, is fast becoming the place to be. Seemingly every CEO with a Netflix account is adamant their underlings find a way to get the firm’s logo into the pit lane in 2026. Some, like Cadillac and Audi, have acquired a whole team. Others are taking advantage of the new engine regulations to throw their hat into the power unit manufacturer ring. Red Bull and Ford were the high-level collaboration being talked about last week; this week Honda has chosen to show us the new PU it will supply to Aston Martin this season.

Of course, the company is no Johnny-come-lately to the business of F1 - it can trace its participation back to 1964 and is responsible for some of the most famous engines ever to grace the sport - though it is one of the OEMs that claims to have been enticed back by a far-reaching change in regulations. In a nutshell, the 2026-onwards PU will retain a tweaked 1.6-litre turbocharged V6, but drastically reconfigure the Motor-Generator Unit (i.e. the hybrid bit) so that it better resembles the recuperation technology used in road cars. It ought to make them slightly simpler; certainly it will make the power supplied by the electrical system around three times more formidable.

Naturally, its maker said precious little about such technical details when it unveiled RA626H in Tokyo, except to acknowledge that it has developed the new sustainable fuel-driven unit under the restrictive cost cap system, and that any car powered by it - or any other Honda Racing Corporation (HRC) engine for that matter - would feature the refreshed H mark design revealed just last week. You can hardly miss it on the 2026 Aston Martin F1 car mockup.

Of more interest was the messaging surrounding the unveiling, not least because it made implicit the idea that HRC’s involvement would extend to its road cars - a notion that it revealed on stage at the Tokyo Auto Salon earlier this month. You can expect to hear other manufacturers talk about ‘leveraging’ the technology and experience it accrues in F1 this year (as they always do), but confirmation Honda would ‘introduce HRC-spec production models that offer further refined driving performance’ was a welcome revelation.

Even more so when Honda announced that among those new variants would be a ‘production model based on the Civic Type R HRC Concept’ - i.e. the aggressively bodykit’d and very colourful show car that featured on its Tokyo stand. Aside from the visible tweaks to its appearance, little was said about the model at the time, apart from the idea that it “further refines the joy of handling that only Honda can offer, honed at the forefront of racing”. Which is a fairly exciting prospect given how much joy the current CTR is already capable of dispensing.

Granted, that excitement must be tempered by the Type R's slow death in Europe this year, a result of its failure to satisfy incoming emissions legislation. The chances of an HRC edition slipping under the wire seem impossibly remote at this stage. Perhaps we should cling instead to the possibility that the new Prelude will get the same treatment; a thought underwritten not just by Honda’s proclamation on bringing driving happiness to a ‘broader range of customers’, but by a fixed rear wing-wearing HRC concept on the very same Tokyo show stand. We can but hope, eh?