If I was Honda, I would seriously consider rebranding next year's engine as a Mugen. The same goes for Maybach, Lancia, Alpine.
I like this. Who knows what sort of worms could be let out of the can.
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Sort of, kind of? The story is far more complex that that.
Mecachrome SAS is an engineering company - their engines were branded to Williams as Mecachrome
Mecachrome engines were debranded and rebranded when Benetton renamed them Playlife. Playlife did no engineering at all.
Mecachrome engines were debranded and also rebranded as Supertec, in the back of Arrows, BAR and Williams. Supertec also did no engineering at all.
Petronas Engineering (aka Ferraris "built" under licence) were kind of a pretend engineering company from what I can gather. I have no idea of the arrangements but is it really a new engine if you pull it apart to component pieces and rebuild it again?
I don't think that McLaren would need to take an engine in house. Honda could play the shell game. Precedents for this sort of thing exist.
It would not be a new engine as it is still using some Renault parts that were previously homologated. So, technically, even an unbranded version would at best be a different version of the Renault, homologated independently from the original.
I don't think Red Bull will do too much development on it, as they are still pushing for the independent 2.2 ltr. Biturbo V6 in 2017. The rest depends on whether or not Volkswagen will survive the exhaust gas cheating scandal, which is not a given. I do think that nearly everything now depends on whether the 'Horner engine', as it is apparently called in the paddock, will be introduced. If so, RB will merely work on making the engine more reliable and mainly write off the 2016 season. That's the gist of what their mouth-piece Dr. Marko said on Austrian TV yesterday.
TAG boss Mansour Ojjeh is in the process of selling his McLaren shares.
What if we see a Red Bull-TAG in 2017?
Actually, not all the parts are from Renault. Redbull has been developing some of the parts for the engine. I hear the software was jointly developed by Redbull and Renault. There might be enough there for Redbull to argue that it was a different engine from the stock Renault engine.
http://beta.autosport.com/news/repor...infiniti-split
Red Bull has confirmed it is to split from long-time Formula 1 commercial partner Infiniti at the end of the year.
The move, as predicted by Autosport, comes in the wake of Red Bull announcing on Friday an engine-branding tie up with new sponsor Tag Heuer.
- Autosport, 6th Dec 2015
Dear Autosport, I saw this before you did. I'm claiming psychic kudos on this one.
In other psychic news, Liverpool will not win the Premier League, they will find MH17 and Donald Trump will make insensitive remarks about Muslims.
This is