When Fernando Alonso uttered the famous “GP2 engine, gah!” line while racing at the Japanese Grand Prix in Suzuka in 2015, the toiling Honda engineers 500 km away in Sakura must have felt that recapturing the Formula 1 glory days of the 1980s – which the fast-crumbling tie-up with McLaren was meant to rekindle – would be a Sisyphean task.
They surely couldn’t have imagined what would come next. It’s been a decade since then, and Honda is signing off a eight-year partnership with Red Bull having won four drivers’ and two constructors’ world championships, with Max Verstappen narrowly losing out on this year’s title at Sunday’s Abu Dhabi Grand Prix to eventual champion Lando Norris. That’s quite a turnaround.
It’s easy to forget that Honda was on the verge of quitting F1 when the McLaren deal ultimately crashed and burnt in 2017. Luckily, Red Bull was also dissatisfied with its underperforming engine supplier Renault, so it threw a lifeline as a way for both of them to get out of their troubles.
Slinging its hitherto-troubled engine – which by then had gained a Mercedes-style split turbo – into the back of the midfield Toro Rosso at first, Honda almost immediately saw an uptick in form, with its best finish of fourth at round two of the 2018 season in Bahrain. By the end, Honda racked up 33 points, three points more than it did previously with McLaren, despite incurring a significant number of penalties as it fast-tracked engine developments ahead of a works partnership with Red Bull in 2019.
Now powering a top team, Honda scored its first podium since returning to the sport at the season opener in Australia, then its first win at the team’s home race in Austria. A further two wins followed, then another three in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, but the step in performance made by Mercedes to dominate that year led Honda to redesign its power unit for 2021.
This set up a title fight for the ages between Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton. The pair traded race win after race win, and they entered the final race in Abu Dhabi level on points. The Mercedes driver looked set claim victory – and the championship – until a late-race crash by Nicholas Latifi, an inspired pit stop under the safety car and a controversial final lap restart enabled Verstappen to make a last-gasp overtake to claim his first drivers’ title. It was also Honda’s first in 30 years, since Ayrton Senna in 1991.
While the acrimonious ending cast a dark cloud over his 2021 gong, Verstappen promptly silenced his critics by romping home to three more titles in convincing fashion. He saw off an early-season challenge from Ferrari in 2022, wiped the floor with the opposition in 2023 (the team won 21 out of 22 races that year, 19 of which went to him) and clung on amidst a late McLaren charge last year.
The statistics of the Red Bull–Honda pairing make for quite some reading. In 172 starts, they scored 72 wins, with Verstappen claiming the lion’s share; his 2021–2024 teammate Sergio Pérez won five races, while Pierre Gasly clinched an emotional victory at the 2020 Italian Grand Prix, driving for Toro Rosso’s successor AlphaTauri (now called Racing Bulls).
The duo also nabbed 51 pole positions, visited the podium 141 times and amassed a whopping 4,545.5 points across both teams. Interestingly, Honda also notes 73 retirements, proving that it understands the failures were just as important as the successes.
Although it officially pulled out of the sport after 2021, Honda continued to support Red Bull in running its engines, which have since been badged Red Bull Powertrains. This arrangement concludes this year as the V6 turbo hybrid era winds down, with Red Bull fielding its own engines with Ford badging in 2026, and Honda moving to supply Aston Martin under a new set of regulations.
“It has been a great pleasure that the technology and people of Honda contributed to the many victories and championships Red Bull Racing earned during this period,” said Honda Racing Corporation (HRC) president Koji Watanabe. “I would like to express my sincere gratitude to everyone involved. Building on these experiences, HRC will continue driving the growth of motorsports and the advancement of Honda technological innovation.”
Partners one year, competitors the next – bring on 2026.
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I still don’t get this new partnership. Honda is a far greater company than Aston Martin. How can they degrade themselves like this? AM road cars don’t even use Honda engines.