Honda 2008 Season Review: Another Poor Year

Honda team information

Chassis:  RA108

Engine: Honda

Team Prinicpal: Ross Brawn

Technical Director: Shuhei Nakamoto

F1 Debut: Germany 1964

F1 starts: 88

F1 points: 154

F1 wins: 3

Pole Positions: 2

Fastest laps: 2

2008 Stats

Wins: 0

Pole Positions: 0

Fastest Laps: 0

Podiums: 1

Points: 14

Championship Position: 9th

Season Highlight: Rubens Barrichello’s thrilling drive in the wet at Silverstone to finish on the podium.

Season Lowlight: Giving the car its initial rundown and finding out it was three seconds off the pace, and had a whole array of problems.

Driver information

Jenson Button:

F1 debut: Australia 2000

F1 Starts: 153

Wins: 1

Pole Positions: 3

Points: 232

2008 Points: 3

Rubens Barrichello:

F1 debut: 1993 South African GP

F1 starts: 267

Wins: 9

Pole Positions: 13

Points: 530

2008 Points: 11

This season should have been a vast improvement for Honda after their disastrous 2007 campaign. However, against all odds, 2008 turned out nearly as bad for Honda.  At least this season, there is some light at the end of the tunnel. The only way now is up.

Honda have now had two nothing seasons with no achievement, and zero return on the vast millions they have been spending. These two seasons are mainly down to previous shocking management.

The first bad call by Honda was sacking Geoff Willis in 2006. The next bad decision was deciding to build a brand new car in 2007, rather than continue to evolve the 2006 car and make use of its advantages. Had Geoff Willis stayed, he would have taken Honda down this route.

The 2007 car was too revolutionary, ambitious and had many problems. Its aero was very weak and the car was extremely unstable. Downforce was applied far too aggressively. Overall, it was 1.5-2.0 seconds off the front running pace.

In November 2007, Ross Brawn joined Honda as team boss. It looked certain that due to his arrival Honda would have a better 2008. However, the problem was that Ross Brawn arrived at Honda, when most of the work on the new 2008 challenger was already complete.

This car was being built and designed by the same people behind the awful 2007 car. Due to the huge 2009 regulation changes, nearly all the teams were opting to just evolve their 2007 challengers for 2008.

Making up over 1.5 seconds over a single winter with stable regulations was going to be nearly impossible. Even harder as other teams certainly weren’t going to stand still.

The new Honda hit the track in testing, and the verdict wasn’t good. The stability was better (which wasn’t difficult in comparison to the 2007 car) but that was the only real positive.

Both Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello probably got the surprise of their life. They discovered the RA108 was even slower than the RA107 relative to the other teams testing with them.

In that first test, Honda were around three seconds off the front running pace. They completed just over 30 laps on that first initial test.

Fans already started joking that the reason for that small number of laps, was down to the fact it took so much longer for the car took to get around the track. This was an exaggeration, of course, but there was an element of truth there.

With Ross Brawn’s influence, a huge array of changes were made to the car before the season opener in Melbourne including: new aero parts, a brand new floor and engine cover amongst other things.

These improvements gave the car two whole seconds' worth of performance. These were two very much needed seconds. Without Ross Brawn’s influence, the team could very well have started the season down at the back of the grid.

With these modifications, Honda started 2008 as a solid midfield team and in the mix. They now had a solid base to work on even though there were still many flaws.

The aero and mechanical grip was still decidedly weak. The car was also very difficult to setup and improve on a race weekend. The engine was another big problem for Honda.

Out of the field, it was by far the weakest powerhouse. This is something that couldn’t be changed much, whilst Formula One was in the middle of the engine freeze regulations.

At the first weekend in 2008, the two cars qualified 11th and 13th. In 2007, they started in 14th and 16th position. So it looked at least that there had been an improvement from 2007 to 2008.

In Bahrain, Button got to the top 10 shootout. In 2007 that took until Monaco. So again, it seemed improvements were being made. Button then scored a great sixth place in Spain (the fourth Round of 2008). In 2007, Honda didn’t score a single point until France (Round 8).

So overall these first few races of 2008 were positive for Honda. They still weren’t anywhere near where they wanted to be, but at least they were heading in the right direction on the grid.

This was as good as it got for Honda in 2008, and for the rest of the season they would sink back to 2007-level performances. In fact by the end of the season, they were even worse.

Ross Brawn saw too many issues with the car and knew they would be difficult to solve. The front teams were setting a fast development rate, so Ross, being realistic, considered the front runners too hard to catch.

The car was terrible on the bumps and dreadful at looking after its tyres, particularly the softer compounds. Often, once the heat was finally in the tyres they got too hot.

Therefore, the car was slow over race distance as well as over one lap. The issue with the tyres was such that for most of the season Honda had to stick with running one-stop strategies. The aero-dynamic efficiency was still very poor.

With the vast regulation changes in 2009, Ross Brawn decided to put more of the team’s resource, and energy into the 2009 challenger. It is rumoured that in 2008 Honda have had up to four wind tunnels working on 2009 at the same time.

It has been regarded that Honda has put itself ahead of all the other teams on the development of KERs (Kinetic Energy Recovery system).

After the big upgrades before Melbourne there were only a couple more sets of upgrades. There was another upgrade before Spain and another before the race before Germany.

That was it. Honda worked on the braking system, and created a new rear suspension which debuted at Hungary which was the final addition to the RA108.

Overall, Honda scored 14 points in 2008 and only finished in the points on four occasions. None of these points were down to the speed of the Honda.

All the points scored had some fortune involved. Spain turned out to be a race of attrition where only 13 cars finished. In Monaco, it rained, which caused drivers to make errors, but in fairness to Rubens, he drove a very good race. In Canada, Barrichello scored two points in another crazy race.

Silverstone was the only really happy race for Honda. In the torrential rain, Rubens Barrichello raced brilliantly to third position. The chance of a podium came about due to a great piece of decision making by Ross Brawn.

As the mid-race torrential rain came down Ross Brawn changed Barrichello onto the extreme wets. Other teams kept their drivers out on intermediates.

Brawn turned out to make the right decision, as Barrichello started lapping 30 seconds faster than the intermediate runners. Rubens breezed past other cars and went into third position and kept it.

Honda wouldn’t have come third in the dry but at least this result was a much needed morale boast for the team.

Honda got no more points for the rest of the season. Without that podium at Silverstone, Honda’s season would have been made to seem even more embarrassing.

Next season, Ross Brawn needs to ensure that heavily compromising 2008 for 2009 was worth it. Will Ross Brawn’s presence as team boss be enough to give Honda a better 2009?

There is no doubt about how highly skilled he is after all his success at Ferrari. It must be remembered that a lot of guys from Benetton came with him to Ferrari and contributed to the success.

Ross Brawn hasn’t brought any high profile engineers/technicians from Ferrari with him. He is working alongside the same team who created the 2007 and 2008 cars which were miles off the mark.

Is his leadership alone enough to get these guys to create a very competitive Formula 1 car? These guys aren’t talentless know-nothings. Far from it.

There is a lot of skill and talent, but there has been no direction whatsoever. Ross Brawn can give this direction. Imagine a talented football team without a manager. It would be a complete mess. The Honda situation recently (before Brawn’s arrival) has been just like that.

Something that Honda has definitely got right is the hierarchy at the top right. Ross Brawn and Nick Fry are joint team bosses. Nick Fry has always been good on the commercial and sponsor side so he works purely on that side of the team.

Ross Brawn just does everything to with the making Honda’s car and working on the team operation. There is no need for him to spend hours in his office doing paperwork making him have less influence on the car.

This setup could work very well for Honda. How many team bosses do we see getting their hands dirty these days?

Driver-wise, Rubens Barrichello has generally been quicker than Jenson Button. Button hasn’t looked that motivated this season. He is desperate to be in a car that can challenge for race victories.

After his win in Hungary 2006, it looked like he could get his wish. These last two seasons must have been awful for him. Jenson Button isn’t good at getting the best out of a car with a lot of problems.

We saw that with the awful car Benetton gave him in 2001. By the time the car had development stopped on it, Button knew he was just turning up every weekend to drive a tail end Charlie.

On the very few occasions Button had to score points, he threw the chance away. In wet practise in Monaco, the sector times showed he was seconds faster than anybody else.

Unfortunately, he was a bit too aggressive at the start of the race, and collided with Nick Heidfeld and the chance for big points was over. In the wet Silverstone race, he made the move to extreme wet tyres.

He was as quick as Barrichello. Barrichello, however, kept the car on the track whereas Jenson Button binned it. Again, a big points opportunity was lost.

Barrichello had a much better attitude throughout the whole 2008 season. Throughout his career before joining Ferrari he has driven great giant killing races in cars below par. He is more adaptable to a car that has problems with than Button.

He gave 110 percent effort and the end result was that he beat his highly rated younger team mate. He scored 11 points to Jenson Button’s three. He still looked to be enjoying F1 as much as he did when he first came into F1 over 250 races ago.

A reason for showing more fighting spirit than Button may be due to the fact that his career has been on the line (and in fact it still is). He needed to show he was still a capable driver.

Jenson Button’s place in the team has always been safe, so Jenson didn’t have the motivation of having to fight for his career. These days in Formula One, if you are over 30, your career is under threat. Formula One is a youth obsessed sport at the moment.

Honda have let down both their drivers down badly over the last couple of seasons. You can only feel sorry for Jenson and Rubens, for suffering the terrible cars they have had to put up with. Both drivers deserve the chance to show what they can do with a better performing car next season.

It would be extremely harsh to ditch Barrichello after the level of performance and commitment he has showed this season. Honda owe him a good car more than anything else.

That’s what they promised him when they joined the team. Honda also need to payback Button for his commitment to the team. He paid millions of his own money to Williams just so that he could stay with them.

Final Verdict

In the end, this season became irrelevant for Honda as they decided to purely focus on 2009, after producing another very poor car. The last couple of seasons have been dreadful for Honda.

This has been mainly caused by bad decisions by the Japanese board (and some by the team themselves too) and thinking that splashing the cash is enough for be successful in F1.

The Japanese board have got to let Ross Brawn get on with his job and not interfere with it. If they step in and tell him how to do his job, Honda will never be successful.

2009 is crunch season for Honda after effectively sacrificing 2008 to focus on it. They simply have to show signs that they can become a front running team in the future. If they can’t achieve that with Ross Brawn at the helm, then it never will happen.