Honda’s secret F1 car revealed

[Duke]

A fantastic read below on the Honda RA109 which was separate to the BGP001, some very cool stuff could be have been on the Brawn, possibly making it dominate as much as Merc are this season

During Honda’s whole ’3rd era’ F1 project it had multiple R&D teams working on car design. In reality there were three main Honda development teams, the main one being at the Honda F1 team in Brackley, England, but in addition to that there was Honda R&D in Tochigi, Japan and finally the smaller HRD facility in Bracknell, England which was primarily concerned with the engines.

When Honda decided to withdraw from F1, the R&D department at Brackley stopped work, when it restarted it was focussed on creating the Brawn BGP001, but the R&D team in Tochigi had continued with the RA109 for much longer than anyone realised.

http://www.racecar-engineering.com/articles/f1/hondas-secret-f1-car-revealed/

 

[Duke]

The Merc engine forced several compromises in the BGP001 though - pretty major ones at that. With the reduced transmission weight that Honda were said to be planning in that article, and maybe some Renault-inspired 'reliability development' to get power up, they could have fixed the deficit and not had a car with the wrong crank height and six inches chopped out of the monocoque....

It was a shame they kept to the rules to literally with engine dev. They went from having one of the most powerful engines to the least. The BGP001 with the tweaked Honda engine, lighter diff, tighter packaging due to less cooling needed compared to Merc and KERS would have probably kept thier lead up all season, rather than just first part.