Honda owes F1 revival to Tost: 'He said we had to continue'

With the arrival of the 2022 season, Honda's final year in F1 is officially over. Toyoharu Tanabe and Masashi Yamamoto look back on their years in the sport and name a pivotal moment in the engine supplier's revival.

In 2017, Honda was still performing incredibly poorly. The engine supplier partnered with McLaren, but the seasons together went dramatically. It was AlphaTauri team boss Franz Tost who continued to believe in Honda after the failed term with McLaren.

“It was actually Franz Tost who said that Honda can do it. He has spoken to board members and said we have to continue, to recover. Before talking to Helmut, we talked to Franz a little bit", Yamamoto tells The Race.

Positive development at Red Bull

The big difference between McLaren and AlphaTauri and Red Bull was the open communication. Also, the Red Bull family asked for more involvement in the political side, while at McLaren it was purely about building the engine. According to Tanabe, at McLaren there was a focus on solving problems, which created a negative development.

After the switch to Red Bull, there was a positive development. "We achieved some level of reliability, then we started to have time to develop the performance more than previous. That's a big change", Tanabe says.