Quote:
Originally Posted by bjohnsonsmith
That wasn't an issue back in the late '80s, when McLaren and Honda dominated. F1Guy's answer seems to make the most sense, having worked with Japanese engineers but even so, coming up to the start of their third season, you would think Honda would have made some progress.
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My opinion...
The Japanese CAN do a good job (just like anyone else). And I expect that things today are much more complicated than they were than in the late 80's. Some comments (not yours bjohnsonsmith) here have a very eurocentric snobbish slant. They speak to real or perceived cultural issues of the Japanese, but tend to ignore other negative stereotypes that may apply to their own culture (e.g. German engineered items are overly complex and fragile). Note, while there may very well be some cultural issues at play, I am very much against painting an entire group with a wide brush and calling it a day.
Regardless, I do acknowledge that the center of gravity within the world of high performance race engines (with F1 in particular) lives in Europe. So that means... yes, if you want to pull in a consultant, they statistically probably will be a european.
I think I have mentioned in another thread, but Honda really has a different philosophy of how they staff up projects like this. They rotate in-house and younger engineers through their motorsports programs. That can hurt as you lose experience and domain knowledge, but it is good in that it distributes the experience a bit more evenly and that helps them outside of the motorsports side of things. But... that approach is really is not a recipe for success if your goal is competition. I am sure at some level Honda understands they make their own job harder, but also realize the benefits.
Honda went radical with the new engine. It apparently is not a refinement of the prior engine. They could have just revised the prior engine, but they didn't want to just catch up, but tried the risky move of leapfroging. Yes, knowledge carries over even if you start again from scratch, but I expect they are having problems with whatever their new concepts are. There is plenty of speculation as to what it is, but they have a number of new things going on. One is the switch to a TJI pre-combustion system (which is difficult). There is also speculation that Honda spent too much time experimenting with different concepts until a late date, vs. picking a specific a path early and then refine it. The upside is that maybe if they did pick a good concept they just need to polish it.
Richard