Will Honda really make an F1 comeback?

Rumours have been rife over the past twelve months about whether one of the most legendary names in Formula One really are on the verge of making a spectacular comeback to the sport for the 2014 season.

Honda left Formula One at the end of  2008 due to a combination of factors. The first and perhaps most pressing concern was the crushing effect that one of the biggest economic slumps in history had on the motor industry in general. With the banking sector completely paralysed by a combination of enormous bad debts and uncertainty in the credit market there was little chance of anyone being loaned the money to buy a car from a financial institution. Anyone with the cash to buy one outright were largely put off by the bleak, long term economic outlook being suggested on the news and in the papers.

As a result of these extremely difficult market conditions, car manufacturers were losing money hand over fist. General Motors was in such a bad state that they needed rescuing by the US government under Barack Obama and Toyota posted their first yearly loss since 1950, losing 350 billion Yen during 2008. These events brought to a close the "manufacturer era" in Formula One as it had been known. In short order BMW, Honda, Toyota and Renault all either left the sport or dramatically cut back their involvement. Team budgets had been escalating at an alarming and unsustainable rate and having a Formula One program no longer made sense for the manufacturer teams.

The only car company to buck this trend and increase their involvement in the sport were Mercedes, however their financial commitment was much lower than that which their one time rivals leaving the sport had been shelling out in the years leading up to the financial crash. In fact it was less than the likes of Mclaren, Red Bull and Ferrari were spending each year until as recently as the end  of the 2012 season.

Even if these disastrous events in the global financial sector had not occurred there is a good chance that Honda would have pulled out sooner rather than late anyway. Apart from the extremely poor return on the Japanese company's investment results wise, there was definitely a feeling at board level in Honda that Formula One no longer represented what the company's publicly stated aims were.

Going back as far as when Honda initially returned to Formula One in 1983 after an absence going back to 1968, their ambitions dovetailed perfectly with the image of Formula One. It was the 1980's and the era of the "hot hatch" and conspicuous spending. "Flash" was the look to have and performance models of popular family cars were available at reasonable prices to help people obtain this image on a limited budget.

A great many of these hot hatches were turbocharged and along with Group B rallying, Formula One during this decade provided the perfect test bed and marketing tool for developing and promoting a car manufacturer's range of sports models. Honda were at the forefront of the beginning of their first comeback, a deliberately low key affair with the small and fleeting Spirit F1 team right through to their exit at the end of the 1992 season. By the middle of the decade and towards the end of the turbo era their's was the best engine in the sport and much success followed powering first Williams and then Mclaren to driver's and constructor's world titles. With Mclaren this success carried on into the normally aspirated engine era after the 1988 season. A combination of an economic downturn at the beginning of the 1990's and the companies technical prowess being overhauled saw Honda withdraw from the sport at the end of a season which saw them mauled by the Williams-Renault combination driven by Nigel Mansell and Riccardo Patrese.

The 1983 Spirit-Honda.

They kept a foot in the door of the Formula One with their by proxy provision of support for an engine program that was badged as "Mugen-Honda" and was an evolution version of the the final Honda works units. These were developed by the Mugen company owned by Hirotoshi Honda, the son of Honda founder Soichiro Honda and this arrangement ran from 1991 until Honda's works return as an engine supplier in 2000.

The Mugen-Honda V10 unit that powered cars for Tyrrell, Lotus, Ligier, Prost and Jordan during the 1990s.

During their post millennium stint in the sport, environmental concerns increasingly moved on to the agenda of the major car manufacturers, Honda even more so than others. Their marketing campaigns were based around the the company's history of innovation and their current strides to push technological innovation in a greener direction. For a long time, Formula One did nothing of the sort. Money was poured on a huge scale into a gas guzzling engine development arms race that was not curtailed until the 2006 season and the sport's one concession to environmental concerns, the KERS system was delayed on numerous occasions.

So what has changed over the past four seasons to tempt Honda back? Well the first thing has been the budget caps agreed by all the teams from the 2009 season. This limits the chance of a works team getting dragged back into another budget and development arms race with their rivals that no one can afford. The second thing is the significant rule changes that are scheduled to come into effect regarding engine specifications.

From 2014 the cars will be using a turbocharged 1.6 litre V6 engine with a more powerful energy recovery system available than at present. This replacement for KERS, known by the new name of ERS (or Energy Recovery System) will raise the maximum amount of energy harvested by the system from 400 kilojoules to 2 megajoules per lap. This increased energy can be used either via the current method of a battery boosting power output at the rear axle directly, or it can be used to spool the single turbocharger up to operating RPM straightaway and avoid the dreaded "turbo lag" of engines of this type. The electrical energy available will rise from 70bhp at present to 161bhp under the new formula. Additional power will be recoverable from the engine's exhaust gases via the turbocharger. With engines also capped to 15,000 rpm the same amount of power will be available from less fuel.

The new Mercedes 2014 spec turbocharged 1.6 litre V6 engine.

All of these green innovations fit much more with Honda and the other car manufacturer's stated aims for the current decade. Whether the legendary Japanese marque can afford to be left on the sidelines during this new era of  F1 remains to be seen however...