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Honda looking to expand F1 operations

Engine manufacturer Honda is expanding its facilities at Milton Keynes with a view to potentially signing up a second team alongside McLaren in the future.

"At this moment we don’t have any room to provide any resources to another team, but we should be that type of manufacturer I think," said Honda boss Yusuke Hasegawa this week.

"We have to prepare more resources and organisation. Maybe at the end of next year we have to say that we are ready to prepare an engine for another team, so we will prepare the organisation."

Hasegawa emphasised that this didn't mean that Honda was currently in active talks with any teams in the paddock about an engine supply deal, although he added that there had been some informal conversations with interested parties at race weekends.

"Actually everybody is asking me if there’s any possibility that Honda can supply an engine, but it’s just chatting. From a concrete business point of view, no, we don’t have anything."

In the shorter term, Honda has said it plans to spend its final three engine development tokens and introduce a final engine upgrade possibly as early as Malaysia. Jenson Button and Fernando Alonso might receive the upgrade at different races, with Hasegawa keen to avoid taking an engine penalty at Honda's home race at Suzuka.

“Yes, I don’t think the fans will let me take a penalty in Japan. I will not be allowed to walk into the circuit!” he laughed.

After that, Honda will be able to focus on finishing off the 2017-specification engine - although Hasegawa suggested that most of the work had been completed already.

"Actually we almost finished our development for this year," he said, while deftly avoiding directly answering the question of how many people had been involved in the work up to now. “I can’t tell you the number of people but almost 80-90% are on next year already.

"Still we need some confirmation like reliability checking, but we won’t start any more designs and drawings this season."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.