Honda does not want to recruit externally

After a disastrous 2015 season, McLaren and Honda are determined to climb back up the Formula 1 hierarchy. Nevertheless, the Japanese engine manufacturer is not ready to do so at any cost and intends to preserve its model, which involves doing everything in-house.

Yasuhisa Arai, the head of Honda’s F1 program, acknowledges in the pages of the Japanese newspaper Nikkei that the first part of the season was lost because their engineers struggled to identify the technical problems of their power unit: « Until the Spanish Grand Prix in May, it was like playing whack-a-mole: every time we solved one problem, another would appear. We felt the effects of our seven-year absence from racing. Even when we recognized technological issues, we had difficulty quickly finding the causes and the measures to implement to resolve them and make the necessary adjustments. »

One of the main reasons for this lack of responsiveness is that a majority of its staff were new to F1: « Even if we don’t make public the number of people involved in our F1 team, about half were new to this field. We suffered from what athletes call the lack of competition. »

In these conditions, a solution often used in Formula One is to bring in resources from outside, often through golden bridges to quickly acquire the necessary expertise: « We discussed our problems one-on-one with McLaren. Last summer, they asked us if we had enough resources and why we did everything exclusively in-house. They also asked us to recruit external staff, which is a natural thing from their point of view due to the high job mobility in Europe. »

But this is not in Honda’s Japanese philosophy, which consists of empowering its own staff in order to bet on the long term: « We explained that Honda has a different philosophy. It is important to advance our own human resources. It is not acceptable for us to bring in an external engineer who will stay only three or six months. »

Remains to be seen how long such a position can be accepted by McLaren as performance imperatives will quickly make themselves felt, especially to retain their two world champions, Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button.

This touches on a fundamental difference between the Anglo-Saxon approach and the Japanese approach. For the Anglo-Saxons, the goal is to win immediately, no matter the method, whereas for the Japanese, the primary objective is to win one day, following a development carried out internally, based on their own strengths.

With the participation of www.racingbusiness.fr