Perfecting Honda’s 2026 F1 powertrain is “not so easy,” says racing boss
Acura provided accommodation for Ars for the Rolex 24 at Daytona. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.
DAYTONA BEACH, Florida—The North American road racing season kicked off in fine form a couple of weekends ago with the annual Rolex 24 at Daytona. This year, Honda Racing Corporation president Koji Watanabe was invited as the Grand Marshal, and his attendance at the race gave Ars a chance to talk racing with him, including an update on the company’s F1 endeavors, which next year see it team up with Aston Martin. As we found out, it’s going to be hard work.
At the beginning of last year, Honda rearranged the corporate structure around its motorsport activities. Honda Performance Development, which was responsible for developing Honda and Acura racing cars in IndyCar and IMSA, rebranded itself as Honda Racing Corporation US, a move that has meant closer collaboration between the teams in California and Japan, aligning everything under one overall boss—Watanabe.
The ARX-06 at Le Mans—with Takuma Sato?
Given that our roundtable with Watanabe and Vice President of HRC US Kelvin Fu took place during an endurance race, I asked whether the new corporate structure for racing would make a Le Mans program for the ARX-06 more feasible. Until now, the fact that the ARX-06 is branded as an Acura has been a stumbling block—Acura is a US-only brand, so it makes sense to race it in IMSA, but Le Mans and the World Endurance Championship are global events, and such a car would probably need to be labeled as—and therefore paid for by—Honda.
