Red Bull Racing took on a bold decision to switch to Honda power engines alongside its sister outfit Toro Rosso from the 2019 Formula 1 season, thereby ending its 12-years relation with Renault.
Ever since Honda and Toro Rosso agreed to a partnership for the current season, it was clear that Red Bull were monitoring the Japanese manufacturer’s progress closely especially with a decision looming for their own future beyond the 2018 F1 season.
Its relationship with Renault – no matter how successful – was strained on the back few difficult years when the hybrid era kicked in from 2014. It then forced Red Bull to use the Renault unit under the Tag Heuer branding.
However, with the contract expiring, it made it easier for Red Bull to decide whether to stay on with Renault or gamble a change to Honda – which has had a difficult return to F1 themselves with McLaren.
After ending it ties with McLaren, Honda with relatively less pressure focused on bringing a reliable engine in 2018 and slowly extract performance as the year goes on. Indeed, the mantra has seemingly worked despite the up and down results for Toro Rosso so far.
“We’ve been in a privileged position to have a front row seat to monitor the progress of how Honda have been getting on in our sister team at Toro Rosso versus our own power supply,” said Christian Horner. “It’s been great to see that progress.
“We’ve come to the conclusion that Honda are making good strides, good progress on both performance and reliability, and therefore we’ve made the difficult decision to change power units after 12 seasons to something new for 2019 onward.
“We decided that based on the information we had from Montreal – our decision, driven by engineering, was pretty clear cut in the end. So we felt that rather than things getting delayed, or taking further time.
“And Renault were also very interested to have a decision as soon as possible to get their own plans in place, so therefore we decided that the timing was right to make that commitment, make that decision, and hence the announcement today [Tuesday].
“I think the relationship with Toro Rosso has been extremely useful to Honda. Of course Red Bull Technology have an involvement with Toro Rosso through the supply of transmission and so on, so of course there are synergies there, and it only helps create further synergies between the two teams by having both powered by the same power unit.
“So yes, there are definite benefits from common supply, both for Honda, and for Red Bull’s activities in F1.” Horner reckons 2019 was the right time to make the supplier change especially with the new agreement coming in from the 2021 season.
He stressed the switch to Honda is purely for ‘technical driven’ reasons. “Our determination as a team is to keep closing our gap to our immediate competitors and we have been trying to do that in the last couple of years.
“Of course the power unit is [still] a vital element within a Formula 1 car and we are confident that Honda have the right infrastructure, the right resources, the right technical capacity and determination to help us in our quest to reduce the gap to the teams ahead of us, Ferrari and Mercedes,” he said.
Thanking Renault for all the support since the 2007 season, Horner said there still remains a job at hand in 2018 where they have an outside chance to both the titles while mixing it up with Mercedes and Ferrari.
“We’re very much focused on the 2018 world championship,” he said. “We have an outside chance in both championships. We’ve won two grand prix so far this year, we’re third in the constructors’ championship, and there’s a long way to go.
“So, we’re going to be pushing all the way to the finish, and we’re going to be relying on support from Renault to the end of the year, which I’m sure they will give unwaveringly, as they have done during our previous 11 seasons. And yes our priority is to continue our competitive streak in this year’s championship.”
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