How Did Honda Bring F1 Engine Upgrades Despite Lockdown?
When the 2020 Formula One championship finally got underway at the Austrian Grand Prix, Honda had already brought an engine upgrade. Rival engine manufacturers Ferrari, Mercedes, and Renault had all spent the preceding weeks in FIA-enforced shutdowns, so how was Honda able to get away with it?
Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto openly made a jab about this at the Hungarian Grand Prix, pointing out that his team’s own engine development had been frozen. “We were doing developments for this season that we will not be able to introduce during [the season] itself because we had a long shutdown period before the start of the season, which has not been the case for other power unit manufacturers by the way,” he said, clearly alluding to Honda.
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So how did Honda get to do what its rivals couldn’t? According to Nikolas Tombazis, the FIA’s head of technical matters for single-seater categories, it was important to the sport’s governing body not to punish a manufacturer simply because its country had stricter lockdown restrictions.
“The shutdown for Honda was a bit different from the shutdown for the rest of the manufacturers,” Tombazis explained. “Not in terms of duration, but in terms of when it happened.”
Tombasiz says that in the pursuit of fairness and cost savings, all the teams and engine manufacturers accepted that no one would get extra lockdown compared to others because they happened to be in a country that was hit worse by COVID-19.
Italy, and thus Ferrari, were affected first, and then the rest of Europe. When the lockdown began in spring, it was expected that Japan would shut down in the summer. If the FIA had forced Honda to shut down in the spring along with the other teams, it would have been a massive disadvantage for the team should the Japanese government then order the company to shut down in the summer.
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“We didn’t know when we agreed these rules in early April whether Japan would have a lockdown in the summer, depending on how COVID evolved in Japan. So we had to give some flexibility for Honda to have the shutdown a bit later,” Tombasiz told Motorsport.
“If they had a legal requirement to go into lockdown in July in Japan, [it would have been hard to] then go back to the European teams and say, by the way we need to lock you down another month because Japan is locking down. That’s why Honda were able to do some work while the Europeans were in lockdown and they are making up for this now.”
Notably, Honda only worked on improving its engine’s reliability. According to Tombazis, restrictions were in place to prevent manufacturers from upgrading their engines’ performance since February — restrictions he says were fully respected. What’s more, Tombazis claims the process to get reliability upgrades approved makes it impossible to sneak in performance gains, and the other teams even get to know when a competitor seeks approval.
Ultimately, Honda was able to get a head-start on engine development not by cheating or exploiting a loophole in the rules, but because of extraordinary circumstances. Now, the other engine manufacturers will have the time to catch up.
Kurt Verlin was born in France and lives in the United States. Throughout his life he was always told French was the language of romance, but it was English he fell in love with. He likes cats, music, cars, 30 Rock, Formula 1, and pretending to be a race car driver in simulators; but most of all, he just likes to write about it all. See more articles by Kurt.