I just want to point out that this headline is wrong and out of date already. After pulling out of F1, Honda has announced that they're going to be an engine supplier for Indycar. Technically, it's a different division of Honda (Honda USA) but this greenwashing of why they left F1 leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
They're leaving because they're not successful and they're dumping a bunch of money in the sport.
Edit: I made a mistake they've recommitted to supplying engines under the new hybrid rules that indycar is adopting in 2023.
Also because the F1 audience is strongly concentrated in Europe, where Honda's market share is miniscule. Contrasted with Indycar, which is US-based, where Honda has a much larger presence.
How are they not successful? Red Bull racing is #2 in the constructors points this season. Their reliability has been excellent. Both Honda teams are doing better than both Ferrari teams. Red Bull is doing better now than it did with Renault a few years ago.
F1's problem is that it is a technological marvel that is simultaneously obsolete. Like the XB-71 Valkyrie project of the US AirForce, the technology powering modern F1 hybrid power trains is just outstandingly brilliant. However, just like the XB-71 was made obsolete by the advent of ICBMs, the hybrid power train's future for road cars has been overtaken by the advent of Tesla and battery electric vehicles. The metaphorical comparison with XB-70 ends when performance is concerned. F1 hybrids are still far superior to pure battery electric vehicles. So F1 is essentially stuck in the upper-left corner of the price-performance envelope. They are too good to move to pure electric, but their tech is obsolete for road cars. In a few years battery electric vehicles will get to the performance levels of current F1 hybrids, but by that time the mantle of the pinnacle of auto-racing will have been taken by FormulaE. Not a good place for F1 to be. In effect Tesla killed F1.
F1 isn't what it used to be last century. Races were nail biting epic contests, cars visibly improved every season, drivers were international celebrities dicing with real life ending risk, and passionate fans filled the stadiums. Modern races are just a procession of the same few people each weekend in global rich social events.
Literally everything you've said is still true. Formula 1 stopped being like that in the 70s at the latest. Mercedes are too dominant, but there is nearly always a dominant team in the history of F1. The MP4/4's records were set in the 80s for god’s sake.
A Minardi won a race this year (They're called Alpha Tauri now)
The races may be more or less interesting depending on preference, but everything else you've written here is false.
Cars still visibly improve each season, as demonstrated by the fact track records continue to fall each year.
Drivers are still international celebrities, and it's still a very dangerous sport (the fact there are far fewer deaths is a triumph, but it still occurs - Jules Bianchi died from a crash in 2014 and last year in F2 Anthoine Hubert succumb to a hideous incident). If your issue is that too few drivers are dying, then I really don't know what to say because mitigating that risk is a hugely positive thing.
Fans still fill the track grandstands (with the exception of some of the newest venues which may not sell out as easily). Just look at Monza 2019, with the sea of Tifosi under the podium. That passion is still there for a big number of fans, and as the sport is evolving (and more interesting young drivers come through) the fanbase is changing and growing more diverse.
Modern F1 has an extreme amount of simulation behind it that just didn’t exist last century. Whether you can make a car that is good or not is a factor of budget you can spend on engineering teams, wind tunnel time, etc., instead of what whacky idea you can come up with that makes the car better.
Budget caps introduced this year will hopefully start to level the playing field once the 2022 regs kick in.
Drivers still are international celebrities and they still dice with death. Someone died in an F2 car just last year.
But you’re right that it has gotten far safer. Drivers walk away from horrific crashes at insane speeds.
And modern cars despite being less powerful post lap times that boggle the mind. The aero is bonkers. Drivers regularly pull 5G laterally in corners. If it weren’t for rules, I bet we’d see cornering blackouts like fighter pilots get.
To understand why F1 is attractive, watch this speed comparison video, it’s 9 years old so more powerful engines, but slower lap times: https://youtu.be/K2cNqaPSHv0
As for rich people ... you can say the same about any sport. Why watch basketball? It’s just a bunch of millionaires running around in shorts
F1 is more interesting to read about than watch. Quick fix: limit braking efficiencies. The ridiculously short braking zones make opportunities for fighting very limited, so I’d love to see racers having to be more strategic in their driving. It’s not really a spectator sport, it’s a technical contest. MotoGP exists for racing and action.
With the automobile market transitioning to EV, it is inevitable that F1 will be rebooted as an EV contest. Expect Honda to re-enter then, particularly if MotoGP goes EV first.
I don't know, I stopped watching it when Barrichello and Schumacher deliberately swapped places on the penultimate lap of a race. It was always clear there were team orders but that incident was so egregious that I just stopped watching. Also it was getting a bit soporific.
F1 has had very few years where one team didn't totally dominate. Some of those years were the best ever and showcased the drama, technology, power and talent which makes this such a great sport (88-89 is one example).
F-1 has always baffled me as a sport. Not that it's inherently bad or boring, just that there are so many motor sports that make it look that way. Same with NASCAR. I don't understand how an audience for those exists when, for example, rally races exist.
F-1 was really interesting years ago. With no traction control or advanced aerodynamics and less regulations on engine power, it was a real arena for drivers.
It was so fierce that Senna decided to hit his rival in the first corner of a race, taking out both, solidifying Senna's championship.
It was exciting too. Since drivers need to take risks with 750+ HP beasts, Senna battling Schumacher, Villneuve battling Coulthard was fun.
Pit-stop tactics was the cherry on top, not the secret sauce. Engines and drive trains were not regulated. After some deaths, non rational gains (Mercedes 7G-tronic was so quick when paired with their engine. It just accelerated uninterrupted so it got banned. Renault's Open Injection engine was so powerful so it got banned a year later) and hey, it's getting too expensive cries (and Ferrari-Gate), it lost its luster for the audience.
Now the war is behind the scenes. Homologated parts, limited testing and simulation (they have yearly CPU instruction limits!) and some good people rule the sport.
It's no longer about the drivers. It's about the car you drive and the people behind it. If you have the season's best engine and Adrian Newey in your car design team, you can just win.
So it feels like the movie "Death Race" if you have a good car, you have advantage and if it doesn't break down, you win. That's it.
I left watching it the day Ferrari admitted that they're basically financed by FIA (by getting 23% more advertisement revenue cut at the end, every year).
Some more points: Standardized ECU just killed a lot of excitement by limiting remote engine tuning. Ferrari's domination slowly eroded excitement for most people. Drivers being immature and getting away with it eroded its prestige for me. I still miss Jaguar's green/gold cars. Boy, they were handsome.
So its golden era is long gone. No wonder Honda is leaving.
Almost all other motorsport series are either spec series or use Balance of Performance. In effect, they are "gamed" to make the cars equal to ensure closer competition.
F1 is more of an engineering competition than a driver competition, but both are extremely important. There are very few similar motorsport series. Le Mans used to be that way (and died a slow death due to rising costs), Dakar is like that, rally? I believe is like that, but really don't know any others.
I am an F1 fan and I really like the engineering aspect of it.
F1 does a great job of telling a story. the racing itself isn't too exciting, but as a casual spectator it's much more accessible to somebody like me who doesn't really follow it at all but pays attention once in a while. the rivalries are well publicized and the races are obvious. I have no clue what's going on in a rally race, but if i'm over at somebody's place and they've got F1 on the tv, i can probably find something about it to enjoy.
Rally cars don't have the sex appeal that a F1 car does, and put bluntly neither does the sport itself. I do enjoy watching rallying but Formula 1 is so much more interesting to me both as someone who can understand the vehicle dynamics and a fan of racing.
> F-1 has always baffled me as a sport. Not that it's inherently bad or boring, just that there are so many motor sports that make it look that way. Same with NASCAR. I don't understand how an audience for those exists when, for example, rally races exist.
I expect the answer to that involves how well (or how poorly) rallying is televised.
It’s also an important vehicle for focused R&D. F-E for example has specific rules in place, that change each year, to stimulate the advancement of specific bits of electric car technology.
I think there's more to it than the carbon-free tech for Honda(or any other manufacturer for that matter). F1 is getting eaten from the inside with politics and corruption. It takes a lot of effort to stay out in front. For the past half a decade no one has managed to give Mercedes a run for their money and expecting something to change with the new regulations is a huge leap of faith. Meanwhile costs and complexity is through the roof. Remember when a year or two ago Porsche was considering to supply engines for F1? Sure, they don't have a good record as far as F1 goes, but let's not fool ourselves - the engineers at Porsche are absolute gods when it comes to making small capacity, high power engines and hybrid systems. And realistically the main reason why they decided not to move forward was the huge leap of faith considering the exact complexity and costs I mentioned earlier. So there's a good chance the whole thing isn't paying off for Honda.
You are top designer at an F1 team. You've got an idea that will (maybe) make the car go faster. Say it is a different profile rear wing. So you get the lads to build one up (you have your own carbon fibre maufacturing facility on site) and you mount it on the current car and then arrange for the team to rent (say) Brands Hatch for the day, run the new wing, compare sector times, get feedback from the driver, etc - something any technical person would expect to do.
Problem: this is completely against the rules. Can't just take the car out to the track and run it between races when you want. That's why these insane chassis dynos exist, everything is a simulation now, even wind tunnel time and the number of CPUs in your CFD cluster are being regulated. This is all in the name of reducing expenses of course, but it has the opposite effect.
I saw my first F1 race in 1979, it was really something. The sport I see now has almost nothing to do with those times - in some good ways (safety!) but mostly bad (see above).
This is unrelated to the OP because Honda exclusively supply engines and do not have a works Grand Prix team.
When the sport was awash with tobacco money about 15 years ago, the big teams all had an entire testing team, completely divorced from their race team, which would spend most days of the year simply hammering around the racetracks of Europe, at astronomical expense. Such things are illegal now because if they were not the sport would be dead within five years.
Little out of the box innovations that are pretty cool and then banned. The mass dampener in the video is really what gets to me. FIA just loves to ban random things. Like, I get some forced regulations according to safety. The Halos, for example, I get that they must be to a specific standard. But a simple mechanical device that helps keep the car stable, gripping the road? Ban that? We're not talking about group B rally level of innovation.
Kind of feels like the FIA adopted the principle, "If it's fun and/or interesting, ban it."
This is all in the name of reducing expenses of course, but it has the opposite effect.
I always thought it was more like, Ferrari will always spend gobs of money and a small player can only spend a tenth as much- the amount of money spent will not change- but how can we narrow the gap between the high budget & low budget teams, such that a really awesome low budget team has a chance of catching a high budget team napping.
"but it has the opposite effect." - so you think the reduction of engine/power units usage from 2 to 3 per race to 3 per season had an opposite cost effect? Or limitation of tire sets that could be used over a race weekend had an opposite cost effect?
Or do you want to remove the regulations and have only 4 or 6 cars (Mercedes, Ferrari and possible McLaren) racing for 21 races instead of 20 to 22 cars for the same amount of races every season?
I am a casual motorsports fan. F1 and Nascar have become boring with cookie-cutter cars. Would love to see a new racing series that allowed real innovation again. Just impose a team budget cap and some basic rules for track safety (no active aerodynamics, fuel load limits, etc). Otherwise do whatever you like whether it's a 16 cylinder engine or all-wheel drive or a giant wing or something totally nuts.
I actually think we'll see a bit of shuffling and RedBull will end up with either an official Mercedes engine (i.e. Mercs will drop Will-- sorry, one customer, to replace them with RBR) or a funky rebranded not-officially-X-but-basically-the-same engine. Horner and Marko seem to have burnt "one bridge too far" with Renault, Renault themselves suggested that they would take RedBull as customer only as a last resort and if forced by the rules.
Auto racing will just never be the same. I don’t even think EV racing will evolve the sport. The golden days of auto racing involved real innovation like creating super chargers, turbos, certain efficiencies, and improvements in potting, etc. There was a time when we just didn’t know what could be done to build an engine that could run near the edge without blowing.
I don’t think EV will ever have its equivalent. Just not the same as taking an ICE and tweaking it through mechanical engineering to find new performance gains.
End of an era but that’s progress. Maybe fully mechanical cars will find a way to exist as a sport. But I imagine people will lose interest over a few generations. But then, horses still race.
Some of the best motor racing I've personally seen was open class motorcycle racing. It was the 90s, so you had road legal GSXR1100s with the lights taped up, mixing it with 125cc Grand Prix bikes.
I don't get why you couldn't do similar with F1. Make it open slather: if it passes scrutineering, carries a driver, and is safe to be near on a track (no rockets) then go nuts.
Surely part of the expense in F1, and part of the fact that it is increasingly technologically irrelevant, is the incredibly tight restrictions on engineering and testing?
I highly highly highly doubt this is the explanation is true.
F1 is way over regulated with ridiculous rules, crushing innovation and free thinking. Honda knows just as well as everyone else that the technology developed there has trickled down into consumer ICE engines and made them superior in terms of carbon expenditure.
I have a theory that F1 is motorsport for people with no interest in motorsport. You can't possibly watch it for the racing, in a series where 90 minute races routinely end with over 25 seconds between each podium car. Where the fanbase fanatically opposes things like simplified powertrains, simplified aero and control parts, which would all result in far better, closer racing but would (in their minds) erode the prestige of the prototype series. Personally I think prestige comes from winning hard-fought races, not driving a Mercedes to yet another cruising victory.
It boggles my mind that people bother, when there are such incredibly close series like MotoGP, GT World Challenge [Europe|Asia|America], V8 Supercars, etc... The only explanation is that the fans simply don't care about the racing itself.
Honda as an electric company has sucked. Fuel cells continue to be total nonsense and have no viability for the market, yet Honda is one of those companies still investing.
Honda barley produces an EV and in the US seems to want to use GM platform, not even have its own. Meaning that GM will capture the majority of the value.
At some point the competitiveness of ICE will be incredibly clear and Honda is one of those companies who is not even close to being ready. They are good candidate for consolidation in the future.
Call me cynical but I doubt all those companies claiming they'll go "green" or "100% electric" in X years really do that for the environment or are really serious about it.
There is no economical reason to do so dude to the fact that electric cars cost too much, mainly due to the batteries for which the price can only increase if there is a market of a billion users. And except for the high end market which Tesla occupies the most, nobody has the money for that.
Not to say I'm against the idea, coming from a place where hydroelectricity is king I just can't wait to get my first electric car, but I am skeptical.
[+] [-] davewritescode|5 years ago|reply
They're leaving because they're not successful and they're dumping a bunch of money in the sport.
Edit: I made a mistake they've recommitted to supplying engines under the new hybrid rules that indycar is adopting in 2023.
[+] [-] knute|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kube-system|5 years ago|reply
Honda has been a supplier for engines in Indycar for decades
[+] [-] olyjohn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aloukissas|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anjc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sumanthvepa|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] x87678r|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhh__|5 years ago|reply
A Minardi won a race this year (They're called Alpha Tauri now)
Don't look back with rose tinted spectacles.
[+] [-] mrkwse|5 years ago|reply
Cars still visibly improve each season, as demonstrated by the fact track records continue to fall each year.
Drivers are still international celebrities, and it's still a very dangerous sport (the fact there are far fewer deaths is a triumph, but it still occurs - Jules Bianchi died from a crash in 2014 and last year in F2 Anthoine Hubert succumb to a hideous incident). If your issue is that too few drivers are dying, then I really don't know what to say because mitigating that risk is a hugely positive thing.
Fans still fill the track grandstands (with the exception of some of the newest venues which may not sell out as easily). Just look at Monza 2019, with the sea of Tifosi under the podium. That passion is still there for a big number of fans, and as the sport is evolving (and more interesting young drivers come through) the fanbase is changing and growing more diverse.
[+] [-] snuxoll|5 years ago|reply
Budget caps introduced this year will hopefully start to level the playing field once the 2022 regs kick in.
[+] [-] Swizec|5 years ago|reply
But you’re right that it has gotten far safer. Drivers walk away from horrific crashes at insane speeds.
And modern cars despite being less powerful post lap times that boggle the mind. The aero is bonkers. Drivers regularly pull 5G laterally in corners. If it weren’t for rules, I bet we’d see cornering blackouts like fighter pilots get.
To understand why F1 is attractive, watch this speed comparison video, it’s 9 years old so more powerful engines, but slower lap times: https://youtu.be/K2cNqaPSHv0
As for rich people ... you can say the same about any sport. Why watch basketball? It’s just a bunch of millionaires running around in shorts
Edit: here’s another good comparison, motogp vs f1 on the same track this year https://youtu.be/NIIJNSdJoNQ
[+] [-] vr46|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wombatmobile|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisseaton|5 years ago|reply
Why not have a maximum size or something like that and let people innovate within that to do whatever they want? Why the 'formula'?
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geargrinder|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] causality0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bayindirh|5 years ago|reply
It was so fierce that Senna decided to hit his rival in the first corner of a race, taking out both, solidifying Senna's championship.
It was exciting too. Since drivers need to take risks with 750+ HP beasts, Senna battling Schumacher, Villneuve battling Coulthard was fun.
Pit-stop tactics was the cherry on top, not the secret sauce. Engines and drive trains were not regulated. After some deaths, non rational gains (Mercedes 7G-tronic was so quick when paired with their engine. It just accelerated uninterrupted so it got banned. Renault's Open Injection engine was so powerful so it got banned a year later) and hey, it's getting too expensive cries (and Ferrari-Gate), it lost its luster for the audience.
Now the war is behind the scenes. Homologated parts, limited testing and simulation (they have yearly CPU instruction limits!) and some good people rule the sport.
It's no longer about the drivers. It's about the car you drive and the people behind it. If you have the season's best engine and Adrian Newey in your car design team, you can just win.
So it feels like the movie "Death Race" if you have a good car, you have advantage and if it doesn't break down, you win. That's it.
I left watching it the day Ferrari admitted that they're basically financed by FIA (by getting 23% more advertisement revenue cut at the end, every year).
Some more points: Standardized ECU just killed a lot of excitement by limiting remote engine tuning. Ferrari's domination slowly eroded excitement for most people. Drivers being immature and getting away with it eroded its prestige for me. I still miss Jaguar's green/gold cars. Boy, they were handsome.
So its golden era is long gone. No wonder Honda is leaving.
[+] [-] TYPE_FASTER|5 years ago|reply
The Netflix series covering F1 is fun to watch.
[+] [-] chrisseaton|5 years ago|reply
People find competitive races more exciting than individual time trials. I don't think that's really unfathomable is it?
[+] [-] Guthur|5 years ago|reply
Generally I think people find racing more exciting.
[+] [-] saberdancer|5 years ago|reply
F1 is more of an engineering competition than a driver competition, but both are extremely important. There are very few similar motorsport series. Le Mans used to be that way (and died a slow death due to rising costs), Dakar is like that, rally? I believe is like that, but really don't know any others.
I am an F1 fan and I really like the engineering aspect of it.
[+] [-] notatoad|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhh__|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justin66|5 years ago|reply
I expect the answer to that involves how well (or how poorly) rallying is televised.
[+] [-] orf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] axegon_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] W-Stool|5 years ago|reply
You are top designer at an F1 team. You've got an idea that will (maybe) make the car go faster. Say it is a different profile rear wing. So you get the lads to build one up (you have your own carbon fibre maufacturing facility on site) and you mount it on the current car and then arrange for the team to rent (say) Brands Hatch for the day, run the new wing, compare sector times, get feedback from the driver, etc - something any technical person would expect to do.
Problem: this is completely against the rules. Can't just take the car out to the track and run it between races when you want. That's why these insane chassis dynos exist, everything is a simulation now, even wind tunnel time and the number of CPUs in your CFD cluster are being regulated. This is all in the name of reducing expenses of course, but it has the opposite effect.
I saw my first F1 race in 1979, it was really something. The sport I see now has almost nothing to do with those times - in some good ways (safety!) but mostly bad (see above).
I'm out.
[+] [-] DC-3|5 years ago|reply
When the sport was awash with tobacco money about 15 years ago, the big teams all had an entire testing team, completely divorced from their race team, which would spend most days of the year simply hammering around the racetracks of Europe, at astronomical expense. Such things are illegal now because if they were not the sport would be dead within five years.
[+] [-] NoOneNew|5 years ago|reply
Little out of the box innovations that are pretty cool and then banned. The mass dampener in the video is really what gets to me. FIA just loves to ban random things. Like, I get some forced regulations according to safety. The Halos, for example, I get that they must be to a specific standard. But a simple mechanical device that helps keep the car stable, gripping the road? Ban that? We're not talking about group B rally level of innovation.
Kind of feels like the FIA adopted the principle, "If it's fun and/or interesting, ban it."
Fresh blood is needed too.
[+] [-] ip26|5 years ago|reply
I always thought it was more like, Ferrari will always spend gobs of money and a small player can only spend a tenth as much- the amount of money spent will not change- but how can we narrow the gap between the high budget & low budget teams, such that a really awesome low budget team has a chance of catching a high budget team napping.
[+] [-] jocker12|5 years ago|reply
Or do you want to remove the regulations and have only 4 or 6 cars (Mercedes, Ferrari and possible McLaren) racing for 21 races instead of 20 to 22 cars for the same amount of races every season?
[+] [-] nradov|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perfunctory|5 years ago|reply
Makes you wonder how serious one should take this announcement.
> our current goal of "electrifying two-thirds of our global automobile unit sales in 2030"
Sounds ambitious, but we know by now that nobody - no company, no government - has ever met any of their climate pledges.
[+] [-] Thaxll|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toyg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nemo44x|5 years ago|reply
I don’t think EV will ever have its equivalent. Just not the same as taking an ICE and tweaking it through mechanical engineering to find new performance gains.
End of an era but that’s progress. Maybe fully mechanical cars will find a way to exist as a sport. But I imagine people will lose interest over a few generations. But then, horses still race.
[+] [-] duncan_bayne|5 years ago|reply
I don't get why you couldn't do similar with F1. Make it open slather: if it passes scrutineering, carries a driver, and is safe to be near on a track (no rockets) then go nuts.
Surely part of the expense in F1, and part of the fact that it is increasingly technologically irrelevant, is the incredibly tight restrictions on engineering and testing?
[+] [-] exabrial|5 years ago|reply
F1 is way over regulated with ridiculous rules, crushing innovation and free thinking. Honda knows just as well as everyone else that the technology developed there has trickled down into consumer ICE engines and made them superior in terms of carbon expenditure.
Hell of a marketing spin.
[+] [-] mdoms|5 years ago|reply
It boggles my mind that people bother, when there are such incredibly close series like MotoGP, GT World Challenge [Europe|Asia|America], V8 Supercars, etc... The only explanation is that the fans simply don't care about the racing itself.
[+] [-] nickik|5 years ago|reply
Honda barley produces an EV and in the US seems to want to use GM platform, not even have its own. Meaning that GM will capture the majority of the value.
At some point the competitiveness of ICE will be incredibly clear and Honda is one of those companies who is not even close to being ready. They are good candidate for consolidation in the future.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vr46|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeeMassive|5 years ago|reply
There is no economical reason to do so dude to the fact that electric cars cost too much, mainly due to the batteries for which the price can only increase if there is a market of a billion users. And except for the high end market which Tesla occupies the most, nobody has the money for that.
Not to say I'm against the idea, coming from a place where hydroelectricity is king I just can't wait to get my first electric car, but I am skeptical.
[+] [-] burtonator|5 years ago|reply
They've already had to modify tracks as it causes physical damage to spine cords and vertebrae.
What we need is something else which isn't tone death about economic inequality and climate change.
The thing is that it has to be a SPORT so people watch it and it gets as much funding as F1
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sitkack|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thatindiandude|5 years ago|reply