Potentially akin to the US Treasury deciding to “let Lehman Brothers fail”, Honda has pulled out of the Formula 1 Championships citing unsustainable costs and the need to focus engineers on the coming challenges faced by all automotive manufacturers. The entire global motorsports industry will now hold their collective breathes and hope that one-by-one the other manufacturer’s don’t follow suit and start a destructive rippling through the industry. Unfortunately the comments today by the Honda CEO do not send an encouraging signal.
“I want this to be viewed as a sign of just how difficult the business has become,” said Honda CEO Takeo Fukui. “But it’s not just the economic crisis; the car industry has prospered for the past 100 years, and it’s about to enter a vastly different stage—the next 100 years—and we need to prepare ourselves for that.”
According to The Guardian: Fukui said automakers worldwide were under pressure to come up with the kind of cars that no manufacturer has much experience making. Developed countries are clamoring for alternative-fuel vehicles as they tighten emissions regulations, while customers in emerging economies such as India want price-beating, small cars that Honda does not have. “We have 350 to 400 engineers working on F1, and they will be able to focus on these areas,” he said. “I don’t want to focus on the fact that we’re quitting, but rather what we will have achieved in five years, by quitting.”
Regardless of the details of why Honda is quitting F1, all the major motorsports series will be watching their business closely in the wake of the announcement. Honda is Japan’s second largest automaker and if one manufacturer pulls-out of a series it can have a diluting-affect on the value of participating in that series to the other manufacturers. Then the dominoes can all start to fall across the other race series as the same manufacturers start to rethink, and possibly renegotiate, their investments in other series.
Read more on this:
Honda Withdraws From Formula One
Honda Races Against Time To Find A Buyer For Formula 1 Team Ahead Of 2009 Season
Honda Will Still Compete In Superbike
F1 Boss Bernie Ecclestone Called Honda’s Exit A “Wake-Up Call” For The Sport
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