Franz Tost sings Honda’s praises and suggests that the joint project with McLaren did not work out due to a certain arrogance on the part of the British.
Today, McLaren and Honda are both enjoying great success in Formula 1. Last year, for example, Max Verstappen won his fourth consecutive drivers’ championship with Honda power in his Red Bull, while the constructors’ title went to McLaren-Mercedes.
In retrospect, it is all the more surprising that the partnership between the two companies did not work at all around ten years ago. According to former Toro Rosso team boss Franz Tost, the reasons for this are mainly to be found in Woking.
“We had a great working relationship with Honda,” Tost recalls on ServusTV. After three unsuccessful McLaren-Honda years between 2015 and 2017, the two companies parted ways and Honda joined forces with Toro Rosso instead.
At the time, McLaren was quick to blame Honda for the lack of results in public. Fernando Alonso’s outburst on the radio at Suzuka, where he described the Japanese engine as a “GP2 engine” at their home race of all places, remains legendary to this day. And Tost recalls that some people at McLaren also displayed a certain arrogance behind the scenes. “There was a show run in London. We were already in talks with Honda,“ he recalls of a situation in 2017. ”Then the McLaren people said to me, ‘Hey, what do you want with them? ’ I said, ‘Calm down, we’ll talk about it in five years. ’ Only those people weren’t even there five years later,” Tost reveals with a smile.
Honda: From Toro Rosso to Red Bull
The Austrian leaves open exactly who he means by that. The fact is, however, that Honda was “very, very successful in Formula 1” with Red Bull, Tost recalls, revealing: “I told the Honda president at the time that we simply had to start 2018 as a trial year.”
“We have to work hard. Then there’s a chance that Red Bull will also adopt this engine and compete for the world championship,” said Tost, who was proven right with his prediction, because from 2019 onwards, Honda supplied not only Toro Rosso but also the big Red Bull team.
“And that’s how we pulled it off. Very, very disciplined. And I loved working with the Japanese. They are very reliable people, meticulous workers who also have the necessary know-how,” said Tost, who is therefore certain that the McLaren-Honda project did not fail because of the Japanese.
“It didn’t work at McLaren back then because there was no cooperation at all, because the English simply didn’t share any information with the outside world. Everything worked really well for us right from the start,“ emphasizes Tost. ”And then in 2019, they won their first race [with Red Bull]. And we all know how the rest of the story went,” says the long-time team boss. In fact, Honda got back on track much faster with Red Bull than McLaren did on the other side.
While Red Bull Honda won races from 2019 onwards and even World Championship titles in a row from 2021, McLaren did not win another race until 2021 and did not win another title until 2024. For Franz Tost and Co., that must have been a small consolation.
