Honda had a long and distinguished history in Formula One before 2006. The company had competed as a constructor in the 1960s, providing John Surtees and others with machinery before withdrawing at the end of 1968. In the 1980s Honda returned as an engine supplier, powering Williams Grand Prix Engineering and later McLaren through their respective periods of near-total dominance. Ayrton Senna's three championships with McLaren in Honda-powered cars between 1988 and 1991 represented the high point of that association. Honda withdrew as an engine supplier in 1992.
The third Honda era began as an engine partnership with BAR — the British American Racing team established by Craig Pollock and BAT in 1999 — which Honda progressively increased its stake in before acquiring outright in 2006. The former BAR Brackley facility became Honda Racing F1 Team, with Nick Fry as chief executive and Shuhei Nakamoto leading the engine programme from Japan.
Jenson Button arrived at Honda Racing F1 Team having spent the 2004 and 2005 seasons at BAR Honda as one of the most promising British drivers of his generation. His near-championship campaign of 2004 — when he finished third in the Drivers' Championship and was genuinely competitive for much of the season — had established him as a front-runner in the correct machinery. Button had signed a controversial agreement to move to Williams Grand Prix Engineering for 2005, was retained at BAR through legal action, and remained with the squad through its transformation into Honda.
Rubens Barrichello, the veteran Brazilian driver who had spent six seasons at Scuderia Ferrari as Michael Schumacher's partner from 2000 to 2005, joined the team for 2006. Barrichello's Ferrari years had produced 9 Grand Prix victories and two runner-up finishes in the Drivers' Championship — in 2002 and 2004 — though his status within Ferrari as number-two driver to Schumacher had been explicit and had generated considerable controversy, including at the 2002 Austrian Grand Prix where he was instructed to cede the lead to Schumacher on the final lap. Barrichello brought to Honda extensive technical experience and genuine race-winning credentials.
The 2006 season, Honda Racing F1 Team's first under its own name, was a difficult year. The Honda RA106 used a Honda V8 engine — compliant with the new 2.4-litre normally-aspirated regulations that replaced the V10 formula — and was not immediately competitive against the Renault R26 driven by Fernando Alonso or the Ferrari 248 F1 carrying Schumacher and Felipe Massa.
The season's highlight arrived unexpectedly at the 2006 Hungarian Grand Prix at Hungaroring. Jenson Button, starting from pole position in dry conditions that became wet and created strategic complexity, managed a brilliant tactical race to take his and Honda's first Grand Prix victory since Ayrton Senna's 1991 Australian Grand Prix triumph for McLaren. For Button, the win was the culmination of years of near-misses and was received with considerable emotion by a driver whose talent had been doubted during fallow periods earlier in his career. For Honda, it was a moment of justification for the investment in the constructor programme.
Outside Hungary, the 2006 campaign was inconsistent. The RA106 was quick in certain conditions and on certain circuits but lacked the aerodynamic and mechanical consistency of the Renault and Ferrari packages. Barrichello and Button between them finished the Constructors' Championship in fourth place — a creditable result for a team in transition.
The 2007 season produced one of the most discussed underperformances of the decade. The Honda RA107 was, by the judgement of almost everyone involved, a significant step backwards from the RA106. The car's aerodynamic concept was compromised by a distinctive sidepod design that proved ineffective in practice, and the lap times showed it: Button and Barrichello struggled to qualify consistently in the top half of the grid, finishing eighth in the Constructors' Championship with only 6 points to the team's name.
The causes of the RA107's failure were identified as aerodynamic: the team had pursued a concept that offered theoretical advantages in downforce generation but which proved difficult to develop into a race-competitive package. The Brackley engineering staff, including technical leadership, went through significant internal review during the season and into the winter.
Ross Brawn, who had been a pivotal figure at both Benetton Formula — where he led the technical team during Michael Schumacher's first two championships in 1994 and 1995 — and at Scuderia Ferrari, where he served as Technical Director and later Sporting Director through Schumacher's five consecutive championships from 2000 to 2004, was recruited to lead the Honda technical operation ahead of 2008. Brawn's arrival was the single most consequential decision in the team's history.
The 2008 season was in competitive terms again difficult — the Honda RA108 was not among the faster cars in the field — but the year produced the team's most culturally enduring contribution: the Earth livery campaign.
Honda partnered with the environmental organisation Earthdream Technology to replace the team's conventional sponsor livery with a full-wrap image of the Earth as photographed from space, covering the sidepods, engine cover, and much of the chassis of the RA108. The car carried messages about environmental awareness and sustainability — a rare instance of a Formula One car dedicated to a cause rather than a commercial sponsor. Fans and observers around the world were invited to have their names included in a digital campaign associated with the initiative.
The livery divided opinion within Formula One. Critics noted that a sport generating the carbon footprint of a global travelling circus was an incongruous platform for environmental advocacy; supporters pointed to the scale of the campaign's reach and the sincerity of Honda's corporate environmental commitments, which extended into its road-car programme. Whatever the philosophical merits, the RA108's appearance on the Formula One grid in 2008 was one of the most visually distinctive of the modern era, a car immediately recognisable even in a field of colourful liveries.
Button and Barrichello fought through a difficult season. The RA108 was not consistently competitive, though individual races produced some encouraging results. The team finished the Constructors' Championship in lower midfield positions. Through the season, Honda's corporate leadership in Japan was reviewing the economics of the Formula One programme against the backdrop of the global financial crisis that intensified through the autumn of 2008.
In December 2008, Honda announced its immediate withdrawal from Formula One. The decision was framed as a response to the global economic downturn and the need to focus resources on Honda's core road-car business during a period of severe industry contraction. The announcement came at a moment when Ross Brawn and the Brackley engineering team were, unknown to the broader public, in the advanced stages of developing what would become the Brawn BGP 001.
Brawn led a management buyout of the team's assets from Honda in early 2009, acquiring the operation for a nominal sum. The newly formed Brawn GP scrambled to secure engine supply from Mercedes-Benz — Brawn had maintained a relationship with Mercedes's motorsport division from his Ferrari years — and to resolve the sponsorship situation for a team that had been stripped of its Honda corporate backing.
The Brawn BGP 001 was in key respects the car that Honda had been building when it announced its withdrawal: an aggressive technical concept centred on a double-diffuser design that exploited a regulatory grey area in the new aerodynamic rules. When the FIA confirmed the double-diffuser legal after teams protested it, Brawn GP — along with Toyota F1 and Williams, who had also incorporated the concept — had a significant performance advantage over much of the field.
Jenson Button won six of the first seven races of the 2009 Formula One season and secured the World Championship at the Brazilian Grand Prix at Interlagos. Barrichello won two races and finished third in the championship. Brawn GP won the Constructors' Championship at the same event. It remains one of the most remarkable single-season stories in Formula One history — a championship won with effectively zero budget for much of the year, by a team that had been scheduled for dissolution five months earlier.
Mercedes-Benz subsequently acquired Brawn GP at the end of 2009, renaming it Mercedes GP from 2010 and eventually building it into the dominant constructor of the Lewis Hamilton era. The direct lineage from the Honda Racing F1 Team facility at Brackley to the most successful constructor of the hybrid era is one of Formula One's more striking institutional continuities.
The Honda RA106, RA107, and RA108 represented three years of development within the Honda corporate R&D structure, drawing on the company's road-car and ASIMO robotics engineering cultures in addition to its racing heritage. The power units were developed at Honda R&D Co. in Sakura, Japan, and were generally regarded as competitive if not at the absolute leading edge of the V8 engine formula.
The aerodynamic and chassis engineering at Brackley — which had been built up progressively through the BAR years under chief aerodynamicist Loïc Bigois and others — was the foundation on which Ross Brawn and his team developed the BGP 001. The double-diffuser concept that defined Brawn GP's 2009 campaign was developed within the Honda programme before the withdrawal — a technical inheritance from a manufacturer that had departed the sport.
The Brackley factory, located in Northamptonshire near the Silverstone circuit, has been continuously active in Formula One since the BAR era of the late 1990s. Through Honda Racing F1 Team, Brawn GP, Mercedes GP, and Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team, the facility has hosted the design and construction of cars that between them have won dozens of World Championships in the 21st century. The Honda years, though not themselves championships, were an integral stage in building the operational and engineering culture that made those later successes possible.
Jenson Button has spoken about the Honda years in several interview contexts, describing the frustration of the RA107 campaign in particular — a car he felt was genuinely capable of the front of the grid on raw talent and effort, but which failed due to a development direction that did not pan out. His description of the moment Honda announced the withdrawal — learning that the team he had committed his career to was being shut down over the winter — and the subsequent reprieve through Brawn's buyout, captures the volatility of Formula One's commercial landscape in ways that straightforward results tables do not.
The 2006 Hungarian Grand Prix victory remains the high point of the Honda Racing F1 Team's competitive record — a result achieved through strategic excellence, a driver performing at his peak, and conditions that levelled the playing field. In a team history dominated by near-misses and underperformance, it stands as evidence of what the programme was capable of when the elements aligned.
Honda Racing F1 Team scored one Grand Prix victory in three seasons of competition, accumulated a modest championship points tally, and is remembered primarily through three lenses: the Earth Car livery of 2008 as one of the sport's more arresting aesthetic moments; the 2006 Hungarian Grand Prix as Jenson Button's breakthrough result; and the facility and personnel it left behind as the foundation of Brawn GP and ultimately Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team. The story of what Honda built at Brackley without ever winning a championship is in some ways more significant than the championships Honda won there as a supplier in the 1980s, because the infrastructure and engineering culture outlasted the manufacturer that created it.
Gallery · 4 related images
