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Formula One Can't Decide If It's Going Green. Honda's Exit Shows It Needs To21/10/2020
Formula One is, arguably-and we definitely know you can debate this-the world's premier motor racing series. It's been going for more than 1,000 races, over the past 70-plus years now. Millions of people watch it worldwide and despite the difficulties of operating a colossal, international series during coronavirus, it's still putting pretty decent seasons together. But everyone seems to be very angry about it all the time, including people who like it or are even investing massive amounts of money in it.
Honda announced last week that it will leave the sport, for the fourth time since F1's inception, autel al539. after the 2021 season. The reasons cited in the press release were thpany has to refocus its engineering capacity on achieving net carbon neutrality by 2050, with no capacity left for running a Formula One program on the side.
A lot of people have been pretty cynical about that as a proposition. After all, Formula One has announced the (vague) ambition to be carbon neutral by 2030, two decades before Honda are aiming to get there.
The hybrid era of F1 uses the most efficient power units ever built. They're artisan, mind-numbingly over-engineered works of automotive art, a V6 and the energy recovery system taking 100 kilograms of (high-end, bespoke but) road-usable fuel through a whole Grand Prix, at speeds the sport has never seen before.
They're one of the things making everyone incredibly angry, of course.
Mercedes, the dominant force of the hybrid era, has said its power unit has achieved thermal efficiency over 50 percent, with the electric powertrain elements at over 96 percent efficiency. For a system that, although it's got a battery, starts a race with no plug-in charge and has to regenerate everything it uses, that's pushing the limits of physics, given every material has some resistance.
Speaking of Mercedes, a few days after Honda's departure announcement, Merc's parent group Daimler announced a new "Electric First" strategy and six new electric vehicles in the EQ range, associated with Mercedes' Formula E team. No need for panic over at Formula One Management, however, as the brand said it'll be using HPP-the same research and development division that develops its F1 power units-to directly plug in technology to the new cars.
Nice to be Mercedes, of course, whose F1 program actually turns a profit despite costing upwards of $400 million a year, making it hardly difficult to justify to even the toughest boardroom crowd. Less nice to be Honda, whose return to the sport in the hybrid era, motivated by the potential to make the truly efficient race cars that have actually been made, hasn't been as dominantly well-received.
By 2017, during the end of three miserable seasons as supplier to a spiraling McLaren, there was already speculation about whether Honda would walk. At the time, the F1 division was going door-to-door to backmarker teams, asking if anyone might be interested in their power units rather than another gamble on last season's Ferrari.
There's nothing like a redemption story and Honda has eventually, with a sense of relief similar to a Red Bull driver getting a contract renewal instead of the boot, come good. Honda is the only hybrid-era manufacturer to win with two separate teams (Max Verstappen has taken four victories for them at Red Bull and Pierre Gasly snatched an impossible win for AlphaTauri in Monza) and have vowed to throw everything at a last gasp title challenge for 2021.
So, why quit now? Just when things are looking relatively ok? Surely it's not only the threat of Fernando Alonso coming back.
Honda has said that it's because its F1 engineering program is driven from Sakura, where they need to repurpose expertise to battery and fuel cell electric vehicles. Which is how it justifies the kinda anachronistic announcement, days after their F1 exit, that it's long-term committing to IndyCar which, with the best will in the world, doesn't exactly have road relevance or eco principles front-and-center of its image.
As a company, Honda is polite to a fault. The years of verbal beatings from McLaren never s...
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