Key figure in Honda's F1 return to be replaced in 2027
Honda will get a new racing boss next year after the retirement of current president and CEO Koji Watanabe, who helped manage the manufacturer’s official return to Formula 1.
Watanabe will be replaced as the head of Honda Racing Corporation by Keiichi Yasuda on January 1, slightly earlier than executive-level changes would typically happen in April to align with the motorsport season.
Yasuda is currently HRC’s executive vice president and representative director.
Like Watanabe, he is a company man who has been with Honda since 1990. Prior to his HRC leadership role, which included overseeing Honda’s official F1 return under the new 2026 engine regulations, Watanabe rose to be a senior figure on the communications and marketing side within Honda.
He assumed the HRC job as part of Honda’s restructuring of its motorsport efforts in 2022 when it unified its motorcycle and car racing programmes under the same entity.
That made Watanabe a senior figure and spokesperson for Honda’s enduring relationship with Red Bull to the end of 2025 and then its new engine project with Aston Martin this year.
Honda has had a dismal formal return to F1, though, suffering a lack of performance even since the chronic reliability problems that caused an embarrassing start to the season across testing and the early races.
This has at least in part been caused by Honda’s shaky commitment to F1 and its damaging decision to withdraw officially at the end of 2021 - only continuing as effectively a service partner to Red Bull, managing the engines that were frozen in homologation from 2022 to 2025.
Honda’s board then decided to re-commit to F1 for the new rules in 2026 after all, which meant attempting to revive a project that had been gutted to redistribute engineers to other programmes - thus leaving Honda on the back foot for the new regulations.
One of the consequences of this was Aston Martin claiming it only discovered late last year just how different the Honda project was to its previous, more successful era with Red Bull.
The key decision for this was made before Watanabe was put in charge of HRC, though his role inevitably made him an important figure thereafter even if his influence over the state of the project this year is hard to discern.
Honda says the change for 2027 is being made “as part of a planned periodic personnel rotation designed to strengthen the management structure in response to global transformation and to accelerate business expansion for the next generation”.
Yasuda comes from the human resources side of Honda, with an interest in its motorcycle activities, and rose to the top position in Honda's HR division prior to joining HRC in 2026.
