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| Goodwood > Honda celebrates the “double forty” at Goodwood |
| Honda celebrates the “double forty” at Goodwood |
The 80s return
Having established itself among the world’s premier automotive manufacturers, Honda fulfilled its departing promise made in 1968 by re-entering Grand Prix racing in 1983. The prime mover behind the new project was Nobuhiko Kawamoto, whose sole objective was to capture the World Championships that had eluded Honda during the 1960s.
During the company’s 15-year absence, however, the F1 world had evolved almost beyond recognition. Honda's return to F1 coincided with the zenith of the turbocharged era which superseded the 3-litre normally aspirated generation of Grand Prix cars that Honda and others had pioneered back in 1966.
During its first F1 programme, Honda had taken on the technical and financial burden of producing both engine and chassis in-house. By the time the company was evaluating a return to F1 in the early 1980s, there was the very attractive alternative of finding an established British race team to provide the chassis.
Honda gained confidence in the merging of Japanese and European racing cultures via a highly successful relationship with the Ralt Formula 2 team for whom Honda supplied 2-litre V6 engines. So, when the company officially announced its re-entry into F1 during the autumn in 1981, it was to be exclusively as an engine supplier.
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The Turbo era
The prototype of Honda’s first turbocharged F1 engine, designated RA163E, was installed in a modified Spirit F2 chassis. The hybrid ran for the first time at Silverstone in November 1982 heralding Honda's return to F1.
Following more development work, the Spirit-Honda made its debut in a non-championship F1 race at Brands Hatch in April 1983 and its full Grand Prix debut at the British Grand Prix in July. In the hands of Stefan Johansson, the car contested five further Grands Prix finishing seventh in Holland and showed enough promise for Honda to secure a contract to supply engines to the front-running Williams team.
To speed up development, a pair of Honda powered FW09s were hastily prepared for the final round of the season in South Africa and Keke Rosberg wasted no time proving the potential of the exciting new partnership. The Finn claimed fifth place to record Honda’s first points of its second era in F1.
In 1984, Honda’s technicians were faced with a new challenge as the F1 authorities introduced a fuel tank capacity limit of 220 litres along with a ban on mid-race refuelling. These stringent new regulations, aimed at constraining ultimate horsepower, forced engineers to marry efficiency with potency.
In order to gain a competitive edge, it became necessary for Honda’s engine builders to decrease the weight of internal moving parts, to minimise frictional losses and to optimise fuel consumption through the use of ever more sophisticated electronic control systems.
For its first full season with Williams, Honda produced the RA164E – a heavily revised version of the RA163E. Despite some early problems largely associated with the enormously high temperatures produced by the forced induction, Rosberg scored Honda’s first Grand Prix victory since 1967 on the streets of Dallas in the USA.
An all-new RA165E engine was introduced mid-way through the following season and immediately received positive reviews from Rosberg and team mate Nigel Mansell. The pair both claimed top six finishes on the new engine’s debut in Canada and Rosberg took the chequered flag at the next Grand Prix in Detroit to record the second victory for a Honda turbo V6. Mansell and Rosberg won the final three races of the season to establish Williams-Honda as the team to beat in 1986 when Nelson Piquet would replace the Finn.
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