Within the long and rich history that Formula 1 has, we can meet legendary names that did what was necessary to mark the sport and even mark us, forever. Within the greatness that Ferrari, McLaren, Williams and now Mercedes carry, we have to say that a classic name of F1 success is Honda.

Just as an engine manufacturer, Honda has won six World Constructors' Championships, five World Drivers' Championships and over 70 Grands Prix. The Japanese company has faced several crises along the time both from its own and from external situations, and, consequently, has withdrawn from the sport the same amount of times. Now, having announced that they are leaving the category at the end of 2021 for the fourth occasion, Honda is now explaining the significant effort that took to build, for now, their last engine for their last year in the sport.

Developing Honda's 2021 Power Unit 📰 Head Of Power Unit Development, Asaki-san, talks us through what took place to get everything ready for the 2021 season 🚀🎌 #PoweredByHonda

— Honda Racing F1 (@HondaRacingF1) April 23, 2021

“The original plan was to implement this new structure PU this year in 2021,” Asaki-san, head of Power Unit development at Honda, explains. “But then for a variety of reasons, it was decided not to proceed with a brand new PU. However, the thinking on this really changed when Honda announced that we would be leaving the sport. I went to President Hachigo, and said to him that we would really like to implement this new structure PU for our last year in the sport. And he kindly accepted that request.”

"With the green light given, our engineers got to work on trying to get everything ready for the new season. That was never going to be an easy task, given the scope of the changes being made to the power unit’s architecture."

Asaki-san confesses the complexity of changes that a new structure meant for the Honda team, comparing it to last year’s Red Bull and Alpha Tauri’s engine, and to have done it in such a short period of time.

"We've also had to make the head cover lower and more compact, which means that the way that air flows over it has become a lot better. And we've also lowered the centre of gravity of the ICE. We changed is the bore pitch, by reducing the distance between one bore and the next, we've made the engine itself shorter, smaller.”

“I'm sure you'll appreciate this is a completely new engine. And we've been able to bring it to a point where in just six months we've taken it testing without any issues.”

“So we've had a number of different development objectives and we believe we have met them.”

And he’s not wrong. As we’ve been able to witness, the Honda engine competing in this F1 season seems to be the strongest one on the grid, challenging Mercedes for the pole in the championship’ first GP and taken the victory from them now in the second event at Imola.

“I believe that we were able to implement everything that we have to in order to compete with Mercedes. We had a lot of cooperation from Red Bull, making sure that we could get the most from this new compact engine. Until the summer we were working on the basis that it was going to be the previous bigger engine.”

“This is the first time that we’ve gone as far as changing the structure of the PU itself. But I think the biggest challenge that we’ve had up to this point was back in the McLaren days, I think the biggest challenges were back then.”

Returning Honda to the 🔝 step in Imola for the first time since Ayrton Senna in 1991 🏆🤝 #PoweredByHonda pic.twitter.com/bnMtqD6eYo

— Red Bull Racing Honda (@redbullracing) April 18, 2021

The Asaki-san’ statement concluded with recognition from the Power Unit boss’ to all of Honda’s team collaborating and working hard for the elaboration of their 2021 engine challenger.

“I had acknowledged in some ways that it was an incredibly challenging target. But I think our engineers have had both the understanding that yes we’ve only got a year left but also we’ve got a full year left and we have to do something with that time, and they’ve worked hard during the time that we have had.”

Honda is with no doubt, a name for F1 romantics. Knowing that they will leave the sport again make us feel a big sense of nostalgia… and hope for the future. Hope for one of the greatest brands in Formula 1 history to make its return, as they’ve already done a couple of times, to keep marking history.