End the Honda dream

It's time for Honda to pull the Formula One plug.

At the same time, Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello should be sacked for being unable to justify their extraordinarily high wages.

For years, the company and its two drivers, have spectacularly failed in painfully embarrassing fashion. They are all - team and drivers - guilty of living on past glories, under-estimating the opposition and being over-confident.

And I fear that they have lost sight of what F1 is supposed to achieve for a) the company b) the two men paid to develop and pilot the cars c) the short-changed race fans and d) Honda car buyers who ultimately fork-out the billions needed for the company to go F1 racing and for Messrs Button and Barrichello to 'earn' countless millions in wages they patently don't deserve.

This is a firm that is right up there (with Mazda and Toyota) as a manufacturer of road cars that boast the best build quality and reliability on the planet. Customer satisfaction levels are traditionally high too. As is Honda's history, work ethic, technical knowledge and general approach to mass vehicle manufacturing - whether it's producing road cars, bikes or more recently, personal mobility machines that fly.

But thanks almost-entirely to its Formula One woes of the last few years, it's in danger of blowing all that credibility by becoming the laughing stock of the F1 circus. For heaven's sake when Button, the top employee and highest earner inside the team confesses to the World that Honda's recent or current F1 cars have been "dogs" or "almost undriveable" or just plain "impossible" the assumption has to be that his damning criticisms are merited.

The sport should be a platform for Honda and its drivers to show-off their prowess. Instead, it is cruelly demonstrating to hundreds of millions of addicted or casual race fans that the company and the pilots somehow can't cut it. And that's embarrassing for all concerned.

How different things were in the late 1980s and early 90s when, aided and abetted by the likes of Nelson Piquet, Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna and partners McLaren and Williams, Honda's name was on the best, most successful F1 cars. In turn, that on- track and driver supremacy led to consumer spin-offs such as the Senna-developed NSX (arguably the World's finest supercar at the time) being born and put on sale in Britain.

Fast forward a decade or so and giant Honda (along with its closest rival, the F1 midget that is Force India) is - inexplicably - responsible for the worst, least successful F1 cars on the grid. The NSX has disappeared from British showrooms. True, there is a Honda S2000 sports car but it's over the hill (not unlike Jenson), over priced and not as desirable as the considerably cheaper Mazd a MX-5 or Audi TT which also undercuts S2000.

What's all this got to do with F1? Plenty. The billions that Honda has wasted and will continue to waste on its F1 car and placing truck loads of money into the bank accounts of its under-performing, over-paid drivers would be far better spent putting long-overdue NSX and S2000 replacements into production and on sale. At the same time, the oceans of additional cash that the company would then have at its disposal might also help bring down the price of its fine but often prohibitively expensive showroom models such as the Jazz, Civic and Accord which can cost far more than rival cars.

What would you as a Honda customer prefer? To continue watching the company spending obscene amounts of cash to sit second from bottom of the F1 pile, competing with Force India to avoid the wooden spoon or to see that colossal F1 budget going into a fresher, wider and more affordable range of showroom products?

Is, for example, the price differential of thousands of pounds between the starting prices of the OK Honda Civic and the superior Volkswagen Golf down to the fact that Honda blows time, money and valuable engineering resources on its F1 nightmare while VW does not?

The harsh truth is that after burning a fortune and wasting several years trying to build a Formula One car that works, Honda has failed to deliver. And its drivers are guilty of the same charge.

Mike Rutherford is a freelance writer, broadcaster and pro-car activist. Currently writing weekly columns for The Daily Telegraph and Auto Express, and monthly columns for The Independent and Motoring & Leisure, he also presented Pulling Power on ITV.

Mike Rutherford will not reply in person to individual emails. AOL may, at its discretion, publish, in part or in full, any comments sent in response to articles published within its channels. Please ensure that you only send in comments if you are happy for this to happen.