2017.02.13

Honda announces its 2017 domestic motorsports activity plan. PL Saeki speaks about NSX-GT

On February 13th, Honda held "Honda Domestic Motorsports Activity Plan Presentation" at "Honda Aoyama Welcome Plaza" located in its headquarter premises in Tokyo and announced the company's motorsports activity and teams of this season. In December, Honda had already revealed two teams which the manufacturer will field racing cars to in SUPER GT and, at Tokyo Auto Salon held in January, all five teams competing in the GT500 class were announced, but at this presentation event the full spectrum of Honda's motorsports was officially presented to the public.

Five cars across five teams are consisted of No.8 AUTOBACS RACING TEAM AGURI (Tomoki Nojiri / Takashi Kobayashi. Bridgestone tire), No.17 KEIHIN REAL RACING (Koudai Tsukakoshi / Takashi Kogure. Bridgestone tire), No.16 TEAM MUGEN (Hideki Mutoh / Daisuke Nakajima. Yokohama tire) which is making a comeback to GT500 class this season, No.64 Epson Nakajima Racing (Bertrand Baguette / Kosuke Matsuura. Dunlop tire), and No.100 TEAM KUNIMITSU (Naoki Yamamoto / Takuya Izawa. Bridgestone tire).

All teams will be competing in NSX-GT built based on a super-sports model, new NSX, which was announced in August last year. Project Leader Masahiro Saeki, HRD Sakura, Honda R&D Co., Ltd., who will take the helm of SUPER GT machine development along with the Super Formula that will use the same engine from this year, answered questions from the journalists, "By developing two (engines) at the same time for SUPER GT and Super Formula, we can probably just pick the good parts, but, most of all, we put our effort in increasing the thermal efficiency while paying attention on combustion. I cannot provide detail numbers, but it is certainly producing more power and we have redesigned the engine blocks and other parts (to support it). We also changed the engine type name to HR-417E, although it's only an internal name." Saeki explained about the current situation of the development carried out on this season's NSX-GT.

It was also announced that, as a part of "Honda Formula Dream Project (HFDP)", Honda's initiative to discover a competitive young driver and help them progress to a higher level, Toshiki Oyu, finished third overall in the FIA-F4 Championship last year, and Ukyo Sasahara, a graduate of Suzuka Circuit Racing School Formula (SRS-F), will compete in the FIA-F4 Championship.