The race is on, but it's going to be off for Honda in Formula One at the end of 2021

with a bombshell announcement on Friday morning that its partnership with Red Bull's teams

will end. It's a big blow, not just a Red Bull, but the whole of Formula One, and the implications

are wide-ranging. I'm Ed Straw, and joining me to discuss all things Honda, are Mark Hughes,

and Scott Mitchell. Scott, hello, first up, you've had a great relationship with those

at Honda over the years, so it's a real shame, isn't it, to know that they'll never be able

to realise the full potential of this program.

Yeah, I've seen, I mean, I came into Formula One once they'd hit Rock Bottom.

So they'd had the three dismal seasons with McLaren and then I had the opportunity to cover their renaissance really,

their revival season with Toro Rosso and then through to the first win with Red Bull

and then how expectations grew and this season's been a bit of a disappointment

but it has been a really, really interesting three seasons covering the sort of second half

of this Formula One spell.

And I know speaking to to a couple of people in the aftermath of the announcement,

just this is because this comes as such a body blow.

It's taken the wind right out of some of the people involved in the project.

And it is such a shame.

There's been a lot of, um,

a lot of money spent obviously from Honda itself, but a lot of effort and a lot of, uh, manpower put in a lot of, a lot of hours spent working, uh, trying to make, make, make, make what was such a fundamentally flawed project into a race winning project again. And the fact that that the fact that this big opportunity to finally put it all together or see if they can actually finally put it all

together seeing that taken out of their hands it on a human level and a sporting level is quite

painful to see yeah it's always important to remember when there's things like this there's

lots of human beings and lives behind this isn't? And even if those involved can be redeployed elsewhere in Honda as the project winds down, it's just a real shame that all that effort just feels like it goes to waste, so that there is a human cost. And Mark, obviously, it was only 12 or so years ago. We were both covering the news

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