The Honda motor company has insisted that they're not really bothered about missing out on Brawn GP's success this season, insisting that it has no regrets about it's 2008 withdrawal despite the championship success of the new team.
Honda withdrew from Formula One at the end of 2008, citing the global financial crisis as a reason, but privately presumably getting sick of the desperate form of their team. However, since selling the team to Ross Brawn at the start of the year, in a deal that saw Honda themselves have to pay a sum of money to guarantee the short-term future of the team, the fortunes of the squad have been completely transformed.
Brawn GP won the constructors title this season, while Jenson Button won six of the first seven races to take the drivers crown. In comparison, Honda won only one race in three years of competition, the 2006 Hungarian GP.
Despite Brawn's success this year, something that Honda failed to achieve in the sport, Honda CEO Takanobu Ito insisted that they had made the right decision in withdrawing from the sport.
In an interview with Autoweek, Ito claimed that: "[I have] no regrets. After our withdrawal, we've seen our team doing extremely well. The reason why I say this is because of all the efforts we put into the team prior to our withdrawal that led to this result."
Instead, Ito tried to argue that Honda's withdrawal was made all the more justifiable by Brawn's success, saying that the fact that the team succeeded rather than struggled meant that the Honda withdrawal had not had an adverse effect on the sport.
He said: "Usually when we decide to withdraw our team from Formula 1 racing, there are fights and anguishes ... fortunately the team has succeeded. It has produced very good results, so people seem to be very happy which is quite unusual.
"Honda is very proud of the fact that we were able to make such a smooth withdrawal based on a very well-thought out plan.... I think we did very well with the withdrawal and after the withdrawal; we managed very quickly to inject all our resources into environmental technology development. [We are] very proud the management was so speedy in making this change."
Ito said that the decision to withdraw had been justified by the financial calamities of the world's economies last year, and that Honda have been able to spend their budget for F1 on developing new environmental technology.
"Just a year ago, Mr. Fakui [Ito's predecessor] made the decision to withdraw from Formula 1 racing and I think it was the correct decision," Ito insisted.
"We do love Formula 1 racing, but even more than that, we had to think about our company; following the [worldwide recession] our management environment had truly deteriorated, also due to the need to comply with environmental needs, [which meant] we had to develop new technologies. So this came first.
"I can surely say the few hundreds of people that were working on Formula 1 and the tens of billions of yen used for Formula 1,this has been converted to the development of environmental technologies."
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