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| Honda redeploys F-1 'warriors' for victory in fuel efficiency |
| Bloomberg / Tokyo Aug 29, 2009, 00:01 IST |
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Honda Motor Co’s withdrawal from Formula One racing in December to save money may give it an advantage over rivals: fresh blood from an elite cadre of engineers to improve its Civic compacts and Odyssey minivans.
The automaker reassigned the racing team’s 400 engineers to speed up development of new technologies to improve fuel efficiency and emission levels for mass-produced cars.
“F-1 was all about pursuing the best energy efficiency to achieve speed,” Kazuo Sakurahara, who led Honda’s team of F-1 engineers, said in an interview at the company’s research center in Tochigi prefecture, north of Tokyo. “In that sense, the approach to our new job is exactly the same as it was then.”
Honda is boosting the brainpower of its research and development team as automakers hasten to meet stricter pollution regulations by moving away from cars powered solely by gasoline. Unlike Toyota Motor Corp and Nissan Motor Co, Honda hasn’t announced plans for a plug-in hybrid or battery-powered car, even as emission regulations in California may force the Tokyo- based carmaker to do so in two years. “The pace of change in environmental technologies is getting faster and faster,” Honda President Takanobu Ito said in an interview. Sakurahara has moved from working on engines with more than 700 horsepower to those in hybrid systems that may take Honda past Toyota in overall efficiency.
US fuel-economy rules set by the Obama administration will force carmakers to produce vehicles that get an average of 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016, four years sooner than previously planned. The Honda fleet’s average fuel economy ranked second at 29.6 mpg in 2008, behind Toyota at 29.7 mpg, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.
The auto industry “isn’t going to shift immediately to battery-only electric vehicles, so the internal combustion engine will remain a core” technology, Sakurahara said.
Honda, which employs about 13,000 engineers in Japan, is expanding its lineup of gasoline-electric hybrid models, bringing out a hybrid version of the CR-Z sports coupe in February and a hybrid Fit compact next year.
Toyota plans to lease plug-in hybrid cars next year and plans to sell battery-powered electric car in 2012. Nissan unveiled its Leaf electric car on August 2 and plans to sell it next year in Japan and the US.
Honda gained 0.2 per cent to 2,990 yen at the close of trading in Tokyo today. The shares have risen 57 per cent this year compared with a 39 per cent gain for Toyota.
“Automakers that are able to spare their resources for advanced and environmental technologies will eventually become the winners at a time when one breakthrough technology will make a huge difference,” said Masayuki Kubota, a senior fund manager in Tokyo who helps manage about $37 million at Daiwa SB Investments Ltd.
Honda quit Formula One racing late last year to cut costs as auto sales plunged amid the global recession. The company, which expects to post a profit of 55 billion yen ($588 million) in the year ending in March, spent about 20 billion yen a year operating the team, excluding engine and car development costs, then-President Takeo Fukui said. Last month, Bayerische Motoren Werke AG also said it would pull out of the race at the end of this season.
Toyota, which forecasts a net loss of 450 billion yen for a second straight year, continues racing in Formula One. Toyota unit Fuji International Speedway Co. said in July it would stop hosting Japan’s Formula One Grand Prix race, citing the recession. It will be held this year at Honda’s Suzuka circuit starting October 2.
Toyota President Akio Toyoda is a racer himself, supporting the sport as a way to “help groom talent by forcing them to solve all sorts of problems within the 24-hour time limit,” he told reporters in June.
Sakurahara was responsible for the engine of the car driven by Jenson Button that won the 2006 Hungarian Grand Prix, he said. The win, one of only three in the Honda team’s Formula One history, came a day after the engine spewed flames during a test run.
“After we changed the engine, we knew we were in really good shape,” Sakurahara said, calling the win his proudest moment.
Honda owned a Formula One team as early as 1964, even before it began making cars in 1967. It dropped out of Formula One in 1969 and returned in the 1980s as an engine supplier. In 2004, Honda purchased a stake in the BAR team from British American Tobacco Plc. It bought out the team a year later to form the Honda team for the 2006 season.
Teams using Honda’s engines won 69 races out of 151. Toyota, which started Formula One racing in 2002, has never won.
When Honda announced it would pull out of Formula One on December 5, Sakurahara’s team was working on a car for the current season that now is being used by Brawn GP.
Instead, the former Formula One engineers will apply their experiences to bettering fuel efficiency, including improving aerodynamics and making components smaller or lighter.
The engineers also developed an advanced regenerative brake system that stores energy. The system was tested on a pilot basis for possible use in Honda’s hybrid cars, Sakurahara said.
Racing trained the engineers to objectively acknowledge what works and what doesn’t, he said. Those competitive instincts now are redirected toward building cars that outsell rivals.
“These 400 are warriors, in a sense,” Sakurahara said. “If you don’t win, that means your technology lost.”
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