News Could Honda return to F1?

With regards to Honda's current status with performance cars and motorsport, the Japanese company seems to be going quite well at the moment. A new NSX supercar and Civic Type-R are in the pipelines, the JDM market will be getting a small roadster sometime soon and the works team is raking in the wins and podium finishes in this year's World Touring Car Championship.

And now, there's speculation that we might see Honda return to Formula One sometime soon, perhaps even as early as 2014.

In an interview with Autocar magazine, the chief of R&D at Honda, Yoshiharu Yamamoto, admitted that "we do look up to those races and hope that we can take part again".

The Q&A session went on to reveal that, should the rules "attract" the firm's attention and "present an opportunity", the board at Honda would consider a return to the top level of formula-series motorsport.

However, it's highly likely that, although Honda has had experience with running a factory 'works' F1 team on two separate occasions now, the Japanese firm would return to the sport as an engine supplier.

After all, building engines is far cheaper than operating your own racing outfit, supplying engines would be a far more logical marketing tool for the car company – if the 1.6 turbocharged V6 will stick around for a while after it's introduced in 2014, it'd be of use in promotional material for the upcoming Civic Type-R (which will most likely come with a 1.6 turbo motor) and NSX supercar (which will definitely come with a V6) – and, let's be honest, how nostalgically awesome would it be if McLaren were to suddenly announce it would drop the Mercedes powerplant in favour for a Honda unit!?

And, us here at Team VVV are seriously hoping that, in the not too distant future, we'll find ourselves in possession of a press release from Honda Racing with a title that consists of these four words: "Honda", "returns", "to" and "F1".

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