A degree of mystery surrounds the works Formula 1 engine Honda is building for Aston Martin in 2026.
Honda's success with Red Bull, winning 50% of the races that have been held since their partnership began in 2019, means sky-high expectations for the Japanese manufacturer's next partnership with Aston Martin.
But very little has been said about the works deal since it was announced in May 2023, in no small part because Honda is still working and winning with Red Bull until the end of 2025.
Then stories emerged at the start of this year after the overall boss of the Honda F1 programme in January 2025 claimed that Honda was struggling with its 2026 development.
Honda Racing Corporation president Koji Watanabe said in a group interview at the Daytona 24 Hours that the development of the new F1 engine had been "not so easy" and "we are struggling".
This was clearly not a good sign. For all the success Honda has enjoyed in recent years, nobody will forget how disastrous the programme was to start with and how long it took Honda to catch up with its rivals.
There is no one-year delay in joining the grid this time round, but this project has come off the back of a weird official Honda withdrawal from F1 then a U-turn before its engine ever actually disappeared - which led to a slightly slow start to proper development as Honda had to rebuild the F1 division it had gutted and redeployed across various electrification projects.
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Since then, Honda's been reassigning people internally and recruiting from outside. But it inevitably lost some momentum and needed to restructure, so there was always a concern that this would be a big hurdle to overcome.
That made it concerning to hear such a senior Honda figure talk of “struggling” at the start of a new rules cycle. The Aston Martin tie-up brings together the team that has spared no expense to make itself an F1 giant, one of if not the greatest designers ever in Adrian Newey, a double world champion driver in Fernando Alonso, and an engine manufacturer that has spared no expense to get to the top in F1 again.
There is clearly a very real possibility of Honda "struggling", whether that's because of its own reorganisations, or the sheer challenge. This matter had an air of misunderstanding about it, though.
Nothing was misquoted or taken out of context, but the bigger the language barrier the easier it is for someone to misspeak, and innocuously use a word that's more dramatic than intended.
Senior Honda executives are often quite cautious, too, so it would be a surprise if Watanabe deliberately admitted to the programme being in trouble in an open media session more than a year before the engine in question gets homologated.
And Honda and Watanabe have since confirmed that suggesting the engine development has been a 'struggle' was a poor choice of words.
"In all fairness, what I tried to say was the 2026 power unit regulation set is technically very tough and challenging," Watanabe told The Race.
"There isn't an easy path."
But there's also no indication Honda has fallen behind, or is in disarray.
It is known that Honda is extremely ambitious with its engine targets, which is a legacy of how it effectively turned around its fortunes in the V6 turbo-hybrid era by pursuing bold and slightly risky solutions.
Honda willingly took on extremely difficult tasks with ingenious approaches to get on top of its weaknesses on both the internal combustion engine and the energy recovery systems, including adopting HondaJet technology to make the turbines in the MGU-H function better and completely redesigning how the cylinders inside the V6 were sited and spaced apart.
Nothing has been revealed so far about what kind of technology Honda is getting creative with on the 2026 power unit. It is more a case of the scale of ambition not being hidden, and Honda's recent track record affording it the benefit of the doubt.
Someone who knows a thing or two about overcoming major hurdles at the start of a new set of engine rules is Aston Martin group CEO and F1 team boss Andy Cowell - who led the Mercedes engine programme to its utterly dominant start to the hybrid era in 2014.
Cowell told The Race: "Is it ever enough? Is anybody ever going to say that we're achieving enough every single week? No, nobody's ever going to say that.
"Because Valvoline wants to do more, Aramco wants to do more, Honda wants to do more, we want to do more.
"We're all ambitious. So, is it perfect? No. It's moving in the right direction, at a good pace."
There is arguably nobody better qualified than Cowell to judge the competency of an F1 engine project, even if we have to take things with a pinch of salt given he is not going to publicly pan the entire thing.
He joined Aston Martin on October 1, 2024, as group CEO, taking over from Martin Whitmarsh - who had been instrumental in getting Honda on board for 2026.
"I've been impressed with the way it's been set up, and I haven't made any big changes," Cowell said of the way the Aston Martin-Honda-Aramco-Valvoline alliance will pull together various strands internationally for the car, engine, fuel and lubricants.
"All I've tried to do is contribute some thoughts about some of the targets and what to push for, first, second and third, and just help with little bits of encouragement."
Cowell only knew Honda as an aspiring competitor when he was managing director of Mercedes High Performance Powertrains. He was aware of its ambition and noted from afar how much it invested in turning around its initially failing F1 engine.
But it wasn't until he joined Aston Martin and visited Honda's Sakura facility in October that the scale of what Honda has to offer dawned on him.
Cowell said he was "blown away by the facilities" there, and not just the infrastructure and technologies, but the way Honda was going about its testing. That includes its approach to development, the atmosphere in the building, and the way test engineers and technicians worked together.
"It was one of those environments that you walk into, and it's just got a buzz about it," Cowell said.
"The level of activity, yes the capital capability that was there was super impressive, but the environment was wonderful. And that's the heart of power unit development.
"There's always a group of engineers that are sat in an office, designing components, thinking of ideas, before that doing analysis. But it all comes together in that test environment, and that's where you're trying to learn about a power unit, either its efficiency, its performance, or its endurance.
"And the buzz in that area put a big smile on my face. And then the hunger of the engineers, their creativity, their push from a time perspective, I was really impressed.
"I'm not working with Honda on a day-to-day basis, but the points where I interact with them, I'm always very impressed by their ambition and their drive and their creativity."
We can take that to mean a very ambitious timeline to achieve the targets.
Because of what Honda concedes was a slightly late start on the 2026 engine as a result of its to-ing and fro-ing, it will push its homologation until February next year to develop solutions until the very last moment.
Honda is satisfied with the progress so far and while it is obviously not ready to go racing yet, 12 months out, Cowell believes the deciding factors will be the ambition of the technology and the timeframe - which he says have led to a "really nice, creative buzz".
What's unanswerable as of March 2025, of course, is just how much progress Honda can actually make from here, and whether 'difficulties' or 'challenges' turn into 'struggles' after all.
"That is a very tough question," Watanabe said when asked if Honda expects similar success with Aston Martin as it has enjoyed with Red Bull.
"I believe no team principal nor power unit supplier representative is able to predict their positioning in the 2026 ranking.
"It is very challenging. We will do our best, that's all I can say now."
