When Honda announced in 2013 they would return to Formula 1 as a power unit supplier to McLaren, many with fond memories of Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost’s dominant title wins of the eighties and nineties hoped for a return to those glory days.
However, the reality proved very different. Honda struggled both with reliability and performance from the word go. Their long path to competitiveness was uncovered in an in-depth feature published by Japanese magazine Motor Fan Illustrated.
The engine Honda introduced in 2015, RA615H, was designed to meet what McLaren’s then-boss Ron Dennis termed a “size zero” concept. It was not Honda that chose this design direction. McLaren’s strong desire for Honda to keep the power unit as small and as compact as possible was the driving factor.
However the Honda team did not create a compact design at the expense of performance. In hindsight, the team had set specifications for the V6 combustion engine development without a clear idea of the…