Red Bull and Alpha Tauri will race with the Honda engine from 2022!

“They have a good plan. At the moment there are several things that look promising.” These words from Pierre Gasly a week ago about the first data that Honda had sent to Faenza about the engine that will power the Alpha Tauri and Red Bull in the 2021 Formula 1 World Championship put Mercedes, Ferrari and Renault on alert.

A small earthquake that this Tuesday will surely have been felt again, but with greater force, in Great Britain, Italy and France. Toyoharu Tanabe, Honda’s technical director at the Great Circus, has announced in ‘The Race’ that within the ambitious plan that they are executing in Sakura to say goodbye to the championship through the front door, the cars of Max Verstappen, Sergio Pérez, Pierre Gasly and Yuki Tsunoda They will equip the power unit that they planned to release in 2022.

Honda points upwards in the Formula 1 World Championship

“We have not managed to meet the goal of winning the title. Therefore, in our last season with the team we want to go for it and for that reason we are going to advance the engine from 2022 to this year. People are highly motivated and no one in Milton Keynes and Sakura has rejected the idea. We are still behind Mercedes, we are getting closer and closer, but there is still a disadvantage. It’s complicated from a power unit point of view and so we’re going back to the original 2021 plan. The people at Honda love racing. If they didn’t have the motivation within them, at the time Honda says it’s leaving Formula 1, we couldn’t stay motivated. Some would say: ‘Okay, one year, same engine, easy, then see you later’. But our people don’t do that. We say ‘OK, our last season, what can we do to get the title? What can we do with the team? That’s why we brought the power unit forward to 2021. People are once again motivated to improve our performance, “says Tanabe.

Likewise, Masashi Yamamoto, head of Honda Motorsport, points out that Japanese technicians feel obliged to make changes to their propeller to win the title and thus fulfill the objective that they set for themselves more than five years ago when they returned to competition: “The fact that we introduce the 2022 engine this year doesn’t have much to do with the decision that we go after 2021. It has more to do with the performance of the others, as Mercedes was very fast and also very stable in 2020. Therefore, we believe that we are obliged to make changes to the power unit. The Red Bull-Honda alliance is a family, so saying goodbye will be tough on the racing team. We looked at whether there were options to continue with them, but it was a company decision. We want to meet expectations in our last year, we are going to give everything “.