Which is crazy, given the fact that Max Verstappen's Honda-powered Red Bull is the only car on the gird that can put up any challenge whatsoever against Mercedes and a Honda-powered Alpha Tauri _won_ at Monza (a circuit where engine performance is critical).
Even more crazy is that when they had very their own team they disbanded it ... only for Ross Brawn to lead an MBO, create a "new" team and win both the Constructors Championship and the Drivers Championship THE VERY NEXT SEASON season before it was bought by Mercedes, who went on to do rather well.
Honda were on the cusp of dominating F1 and decided "nahhh". I wonder if it's actually not that good for business - otherwise someone's gotta be kicking themselves.
> I wonder if it's actually not that good for business
It's actually pretty bad for business. Like European football, it's basically a money pit that generates good indirect returns only to the very top teams. That's why it struggles to keep 10 teams on the grid every year (of whom 3 are effectively "B-teams", one is half-owned by another's boss, one is driven by pilots managed by that same boss...).
That's why manufacturers as massive as Honda and Toyota never stick around F1 for long: they come in, realize how much money and time they will really need to waste to get any hope of winning trophies, and just pull the plug.
Yeah, it’s economics. Mercedes and McLaren have wads of cash to throw at finding the peak performance for their cars. Honda is interested but doesn’t have the investment capital these “premiere” brands do. It’s the equivalent of new money at the yacht club. To belong is going to cost you more than just a membership.
Hamilton got a time penalty and that cost him the win at Monza but Max Verstappen like Alonso has that rare talent of extracting the maximum performance out of non-optimal car.
Yeah, but it's hard to shake the image of McLaren Honda and Alonso and Button suffering from 2015-2017. Those were some miserable races, and the stress was being publicly taken out on two well respected drivers towards the end of their careers.
