Honda returned to Formula 1 in 2015 with McLaren – and the rest of that story is infamous.
At the time, McLaren boasted about Honda’s ‘size zero’ packaging – a demand from the team that made the Japanese manufacturer’s comeback much more difficult than it should have been.
Following all of those engine reliability problems, Honda abandoned the idea with an engine revamp for 2017, but four years later it is now capable of producing an even tighter package than the one it failed to get results from with McLaren, this time with Red Bull at the sharp end of the F1 grid.
Scott Mitchell explains how it achieved that, why it’s a different attempt this time around, and what else we’ve uncovered about the engine that Honda is hoping will allow it to bow out of F1 in style in 2021.
