After five years away from the sport, one would think that jumping back into the Formula One wars would be the furthest thing from the collective engineering minds at Honda, but they are hard at work developing a new powerplant for the 2015 season. Honda’s most recognizable success in Formula One came at the hands of racing legend Ayrton Senna in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Officially named a “power unit”, the new engines also include an energy recovery system, the 1.6L turbocharged V6 is in development at the company’s main research and development center in Tochigi, Japan, with the base of their F1 operations taking place in the town of Milton Keynes in the United Kingdom – also the home of Red Bull Racing.
The complex energy system coupled with the new powerplants is an evolution of the Kinetic Energy Recovery System first used in F1 engines from 2009-13, and uses a motor and electrical generator to convert kinetic energy into electrical energy. Kinetic energy produced by the braking system is recovered by the motor/generator unit and is stored in the battery, which then powers the motor during acceleration. This system is called the Motor Generator Unit – Kinetic, or MGU-K.
There is a second recovery system, dubbed Motor Generator Unit-Heat (or MGU-H) that collects the thermal energy generated by the car’s exhaust system and reuses it to generate electricity. The MGU-H is connected to the engine’s turbocharger, while the MGU-K assists the engine, like a typical hybrid passenger car. The inclusion of these technologies in F1, and the data uncovered through their use, will feed back to production car technologies of the future.
The video shown here is the first of the new engine’s sound, and includes point-of-view footage from some of the world’s most famous F1 racetracks. The new engines will initially power the F1 team of McLaren, whose headquarters is only a short distance away from Milton Keynes, setting the teams up for a solid partnership. The Milton Keynes facility will be responsible for all of the maintenance of the power units, and one can expect that the new Honda units will be on par with the current 750-plus horsepower powerplants of Ferrari, Mercedes AMG, and Renault.
Currently the plan is to keep the engines in the hands of the McLaren team for the first two seasons, and if the results are good enough the company is willing to build engines for other customers.