F1 Talk: Honda’s Make or Break Season with Red Bull

The biggest talking point of the 2019 Formula One season will be the relationship between Red Bull and their new engine partner, Honda. Will it be an improvement from Red Bull’s and Renaults partnership? Will Red Bull suddenly become championship contenders? And of course; Will it play out like McLaren-Honda did in 2015-2017?

If it’s the latter, then there will be a lot of stories regarding Red Bull and Honda this year. Surely, Max Verstappen will want to move to Mercedes or Ferrari; you can just see Helmut Marko threatening to quit F1 again and it could even be the end of Honda in F1.

Hopefully, we see none of that and personally I want to see Red Bull-Honda work, and work well. As good as the Mercedes vs Ferrari battle has been, just adding one extra team in the mix and having someone as talented as Verstappen battling Lewis Hamilton is what we all want to see (at least from the neutral’s perspective).

If you look at the races where Red Bull were able to fight at the front last season, China, Monaco, Austria, Singapore, USA, Mexico, Brazil – apart from Singapore and Mexico (maybe Monaco too) they were all exciting races, China and Brazil especially.

Pierre Gasly will be joining the team but with the greatest respect, I do not see the Frenchman challenging Verstappen over the season. Much of the limelight will be on the young Dutchman as he bids to become the youngest ever F1 World Champion. He has this season and next season to do it but 2019 will be his 5th season in F1. He is so hungry for success. The 21-year-old was bitterly disappointed to say the least to not become the youngest ever pole-sitter last year, after becoming the youngest ever race winner in Spain 2016.

If Red Bull-Honda is a backwards step, Mercedes or Ferrari will snap him up instantly, even if it perhaps ruins their number one and two driver status philosophy. Red Bull cannot afford to lose Verstappen and not make him a world champion after putting so much money and effort into him. Everyone knows how good he is and we just want to see how he will cope fighting for the title. Red Bull team principle, Christian Horner, says Hamilton and Vettel fear Verstappen the most and I agree. They know he will be aggressive and won’t back down so there is some psychology on the track when a battle is taking place with Verstappen involved.

How great would it be to see Verstappen take on Hamilton (who is still the man to beat) after F1 was robbed of Senna vs. Schumacher in the 1990s and many other rivalries failing to last more than one season such as Alonso vs. Hamilton in the last 10 years or so. To compare Verstappen to those kind of names is probably wrong at the moment but we have already had Vettel vs. Hamilton and Hamilton has come out on top, it’s time for a younger, more aggressive driver to fight the defending champion. Will the 2019 Red Bull deliver to give us this battle?

Going back to Honda though, I still believe the move to partner Honda was the right thing for Red Bull. In a way, Red Bull have nothing to lose by leaving Renault as their reliability still suffered (look at Daniel Ricciardo’s endless number of retirements last season), the performance from the engine was still mediocre – so much promise from Renault but often not coming into fruition on the track. Renault have continually struggled to get their new spec engines to work reliably

Conversely, Honda have improved since moving to Toro Rosso and Red Bull do have access to the data. They know the decision they are making and they would not have changed engines if they didn’t see some kind of potential or light at the end of the tunnel. Verstappen has said this in the last week:

“I don’t think we will match Ferrari and Mercedes straight away in terms of power, but Honda is giving everything to get there as quickly as possible”

Will they be on par with Mercedes and Ferrari? I don’t think so, but do not forget that both Mercedes and Ferrari must be very close to the limit in terms of what they can squeeze out of the power unit, whereas Honda are still a way off, so should be able to catch up. If the chassis, drivability and reliability is good and if the drivers can get the most out of each other, then I believe there is a good chance that Red Bull will be fighting for wins by the Summer.

Even if Red Bull still have to use 4-5 Honda engines and therefore have to take the penalty of starting at the back one or two times, with the massive spread between the grid (two tier formula) Verstappen and Gasly should still be able to manage a top five result, similar to what Verstappen did in Russia or USA in 2018 for example. This is why I think pure power from the Honda engine is much more important than reliability.

They showed that the reliability is there last year and Honda are sticking with the same engine concept so we should only see a further improvement in reliability. That’s why peak power unit performance is so important because if Honda can find some kind of “party mode’ for qualifying and we suddenly see a Red Bull on the front row, the driver can turn the engine down if they are at the front of the race which puts less stress on the engine and increased reliability – as I discussed in one of my previous F1 articles. In qualifying, the Honda engine last year was pretty good with Brendon Harley and Gasly managing to get into Q3 and were able to consistently beat the McLaren cars (with the Renault engine) and even the factory Renault team.

Red Bull and Toro Rosso will receive around £80 million, to be split between the teams, from Honda. Red Bull is already pretty well funded but extra money for upgrades is obviously not a bad thing. Toro Rosso will act as a B-team for Red Bull so development from the engine should come much quicker with two teams using Honda engines for the first time in the turbo-hybrid era. This alone should help the progression of the Honda power unit.

Overall, victories should come, which will be great to see as Honda have waited so long for success, it is just a question of when and how many. Opinion is split and it could so easily go the other way, but for the sport’s sake, lets hope we get at least a three way fight at the front with three different engines battling for the win on a regular basis.