Honda officially pulled out of Formula One at the end of the 2021 season but has continued to supply Red Bull and its sister Alpha Tauri team with its power unit, which for 2023 is rebranded as Honda RBPT. The RBPT represents Red Bull Powertrains, which, with support from Ford will field its own power unit for the new 2026 regulations.
While Red Bull concentrates on preparation for the next era, Honda continues to fettle its existing power unit, which is subject to the specification freeze introduced last year and set to run to the end of the current regulations.
Like the other Formula One engine manufacturers Honda planned to make a major upgrade of its power unit for 2022, mindful this was the last opportunity for serious development prior to the current freeze. However, having made its decision to quit Formula One at the end of 2021 it brought that upgrade forward, in time for the 2021 season.
That upgrade is understood to have been centred around major changes to the 1.6 litre V6 turbo at the heart of the current hybrid power unit. While that engine continued in service in 2022, it had to be revised to accept the introduction of E10 (10% ethanol) fuel.
Ahead of this season Tetsushi Kakuda, Honda chief engineer and F1 project leader, told the media, “We made every effort to recover the performance loss due to the E10 fuel but as a result, the internal load to the engine increased significantly compared to the previous years and reliability was severely compromised. As a result, several problems surfaced during the 2022 season.”
Happily those reliability issues did not thwart Red Bull’s domination of 2022 but needed to be addressed to keep the frozen power unit dependably competitive through to the end of the 2025 season. While changes for reliability improvement are permitted subject to FIA approval also for each new season a manufacturer is permitted to introduce one new version of the software controlling their power unit.
While Kakuda admitted that addressing reliability would not in itself improve power output, he did acknowledge that a more dependable unit will offer more options in how the unit is deployed. That in itself can improve performance over the course of a race meeting and of the season.