Losing game: Red Bull's clear frustration at Honda going to Aston

It’s now 40 years since the evolution of F1’s first turbo era, which was kicked off by Renault turning up with a 1.5-litre V6 turbo at Silverstone in ’77 to take on the 3-litre normally-aspirated opposition. At first called ‘the teapot’ because it brewed up a lot and finished most races steaming by the side of the track, it was another five years before turbo engines were de rigueur in F1. Faced with competing against the likes of Renault, BMW and Ferrari, McLaren’s thrusting new team boss, Ron Dennis, along with his backer Mansour Ojjeh, went to Porsche and commissioned a turbo engine. The Porsche board was not about to sanction a works F1 involvement, and so the engine was badged a TAG. It took McLaren to constructors’ titles in ’84-85 and Niki Lauda and Alain Prost to a hat-trick of drivers’ championships from ’84-86.

It was around the same time that Honda itself joined the turbo party. After a toe in the water with what was effectively the Spirit F2 team, the Japanese partnered with Williams, a strong force in the early eighties. At first, the engine was tricky, Keke Rosberg relating how the power delivery as more like an on/off switch. But progress was rapid and by the end of ’85, the Williams-Honda was the class of the field, allowing Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet to set the pace in ’86-7.

At the beginning of ’86, however, Frank Williams had his car accident that left him a paraplegic, returning from a Paul Ricard test. When Williams allowed Mansell and Piquet to fight each other for the championship and allow Prost to steal the drivers title from under their nose in the final race of ’86, Honda was unimpressed. There was board concern that, without Frank at the helm, Williams had lost its way. When Ayrton Senna joined McLaren for ’88, Honda dropped Williams and supplied McLaren instead. Cue another F1 power shift, with McLaren-Honda dominating the next four seasons, across both the end of the first turbo era in ’88 and the new multi-cylinder engines.

You get the impression that Red Bull knows just how formidable a task it may be to take on its current supplier when the new engines arrive for ’26. In Monaco, Max Verstappen said that it was shame that Honda pulled out and prompted Red Bull to set-up its own power division because the commitment down that path meant that they couldn’t get back with Honda.

Previously, Horner has admitted that a relationship beyond ’25 was explored but that it was just logistically too complicated, while Honda Racing Corporation president Koji Watanabe said of the split, “They made the decision and there’s nothing further I can say about this.”

In plain English, Horner said in Monaco, “We would not have made that jump had it not been for Honda’s withdrawal. In many respects we should be grateful for Honda giving us the push to create our own engine facility and the jobs it’s created and then, of course, the partnership with Ford that’s particularly exciting for the future. But would we have taken the same decision knowing what Honda’s decision is today? Absolutely not.”

Lawrence Stroll was not about to miss an open goal, and his team’s transformation this year will not have harmed his credibility in Sakura. Interesting times.

And then there’s Fernando Alonso. He might be 44 when the time comes around but, the way he’s driving, will it matter? He seems to be out of the same mould as Mario Andretti. Give him a competitive Aston-Honda and he’ll drive it at 84 let alone 44! If he can go back to McLaren after 2007, he can certainly drive a Honda again! Forget about “GP2 engine!” a decade on, what great symmetry if he was proclaiming “ballistic engine!” over the radio. As Whitmarsh said, Aston’s Honda partnership might just be the last part of the jigsaw that sees the team achieve its ambitious plans to win.