Honda had supplied engines to British American Racing since 2000, with the partnership producing its best results in 2004 when BAR finished second in the Constructors' Championship. Honda purchased 45% of BAR in late 2004 and bought the remaining 55% from British American Tobacco in September 2005, completing their ambition to become a full Formula One manufacturer team. The squad was renamed Honda Racing F1 Team for 2006, with Nick Fry as team principal and Jenson Button retained alongside new signing Rubens Barrichello, who moved from Ferrari.
Honda's first full season of ownership began with promise. Button scored a fourth place at the Bahrain opener and a podium in Malaysia. At the Australian Grand Prix he took pole position. Results through the middle of the season were inconsistent, with reliability issues hindering both drivers. The championship-defining moment came at the Hungaroring, where an incident-packed race saw Button recover from fourteenth on the grid to win his first Formula One Grand Prix — Honda's first win as a team owner since John Surtees's victory at the 1967 Italian Grand Prix and the first win from a Japanese team owner in the sport. Barrichello finished fourth. After Hungary, Button scored in almost every remaining race of the season, including a third place in Brazil. The team finished fourth in the Constructors' Championship with 86 points.
The team also generated attention for a distinctive environmental campaign. For the 2007 car launch, Honda unveiled the RA107 in a livery depicting planet Earth against a black space background, promoting the environmental awareness website myearthdream.com and abandoning conventional sponsorship in favour of ecological messaging — an unprecedented move in the commercial landscape of Formula One.
The environmental branding coincided with catastrophic on-track performance. The RA107 was slow at the season-opening Australian Grand Prix, where Button and Barrichello qualified fourteenth and seventeenth — well behind Super Aguri's car, which was effectively an updated version of Honda's 2006 chassis. The team failed to score points in the first five races. A point from Button's eighth place in France represented a typical result. From mid-2007, Honda recognised the car's aerodynamic problems and began recruiting across the paddock: Loic Bigois and Francois Martinet arrived from Williams, Jörg Zander from BMW Sauber. The rebuilding exercise signalled a pivot to 2008 and beyond, but the immediate results remained poor. Honda finished eighth in the 2007 Constructors' Championship.
Ross Brawn joined Honda as team principal for 2008, replacing Nick Fry in the sporting role while Fry remained as chief executive. Brawn was the architect of Ferrari's five consecutive Constructors' Championships and Michael Schumacher's five consecutive Drivers' titles between 2000 and 2004. Despite the high-profile appointment, Honda's 2008 car — the RA108 — remained uncompetitive. The team switched development focus to the new 2009 regulations mid-season, pursuing the technical reset rather than trying to recover the current car's performance. Barrichello produced a notable drive in a wet British Grand Prix to take a podium, one of the team's few highlights.
On the RA109 — designed for 2009's new technical regulations — significant development work was completed during 2008. However, on 5 December 2008, Honda announced its immediate withdrawal from Formula One, citing the 2008 financial crisis and the company's unwillingness to continue funding a $300 million annual budget with a team of 700 staff. The withdrawal came with just weeks before the 2009 season preparations were set to intensify.
Honda continued to fund the team financially during the period of sale negotiations. Potential buyers included Prodrive boss David Richards and Mexican businessman Carlos Slim. After sale attempts failed, Ross Brawn and Nick Fry led a management buy-out of the team and infrastructure. With Mercedes supplying engines and Virgin Group providing sponsorship, the reconstituted team entered 2009 as Brawn GP, retaining both Button and Barrichello.
Brawn GP's 2009 season remains one of the most remarkable in Formula One history: Button won the Drivers' Championship and the team won the Constructors' Championship in their only year of existence, largely on the strength of the RA109 design work completed under Honda. Mercedes purchased Brawn GP at the end of 2009, establishing the works team that would go on to win seven consecutive Constructors' Championships from 2014 to 2020. The entire lineage — from BAR to Honda Racing F1 to Brawn to Mercedes — traces directly to the Brackley base Honda built and the infrastructure it created.