The power behind Honda’s American dreams

In the rolling hills north of Los Angeles, next door to a movie lot, Honda’s American motorsport division HPD has produced some of the most potent engines in US motorsport; powerplants that have claimed 18 IndyCar championships and 15 Indianapolis 500 wins, along with a surfeit of sportscar titles and a trio of overall Daytona 24 Hours victories for its luxury Acura marque.

But Honda is a Japanese company, right? Parent company Honda Motor Co is the multinational conglomerate based out of Tokyo, but the American Honda Motor Company, founded in 1959, has grown into a massive concern in its own right – not bad from an initial staff of three with a start-up budget of just $250,000 to sell motorbikes!

Based out of Torrance, a few miles south of Honda Performance Development’s 123,000-square-foot facility in Santa Clarita, it began building road cars in the US in the 1980s. It is now one of the top-selling automotive OEMs in a humongous market.

Honda began its US motorsport operations in 1993, joining the CART Indycar series as an engine builder (with support from Ilmor) in 1994, and then became a bedrock supplier for the Indy Racing League and IndyCar series, where it currently supplies 15 cars in competition with Chevrolet (which, ironically, now uses Ilmors).

In sportscars, after a Spice-chassised programme in the early 1990s using engines straight from Japan, Acura’s entry into the American Le Mans Series raised its game in 2007 – it featured a first bespoke racing engine built completely in-house – beginning with an LMP2 class win at the 12 Hours of Sebring.

That very car, the Andretti Green Racing-run ARX-01a piloted by Dario Franchitti, Bryan Herta and Tony Kanaan, resides in a back room at HPD. It’s pointed to by company president David Salters as the starting point to its heritage as a true factory sportscar entrant, and that reworked Courage chassis has led to a firm partnership with its spiritual successor, ORECA.

In 2023, Acura’s ARX-06 LMDh cars have made a fast start to the IMSA SportsCar Championship, and you could argue that it’s got the second or third-fastest sportscar prototype on the planet, after the World Endurance Championship’s Toyota and Ferrari. Its winning start at the Daytona 24 Hours followed the three-time championship success of its DPi predecessor and, coupled to its successful NSX GT3 project, Acura has scored over 100 race wins in sportscars.

HPD brand Acura took the first win of IMSA's LMDh era with Meyer Shank Racing at the Daytona 24 Hours

Photo by: Richard Dole / Motorsport Images

Salters, who hails from the north-west of England, moved to the US in 2015, after working for Ferrari in Formula 1 and, before that, at Mercedes-Benz High Performance Engines and Cosworth. He says his time in F1 taught him to “see how it can work… and cannot work! Some people were awfully good – Ross Brawn, what a genius – and I’ve been lucky enough to see a lot of different things.”

Of his role today, Salters explains that HPD works independently of its equivalent HRC in Japan, but that they communicate on a regular basis.

“We respond to the marketing side of the brand, and our goal is to promote Honda and Acura, and to develop people and technology,” he says. “We’re all crazy motorsport people, we communicate well together, and Honda is a very respectful company. Racing can be quite an aggressive environment, but there’s a real respect for the individual inside Honda.

HPD can trial the business end of its car on a virtual race track, even simulating the air pressure into the engine and its physical responses to being driven around… while completely stationary

“We do our own thing, because you need to do that to be fast, but we come together every so often. It’d be pretty stupid if we spent all this money and didn’t share the knowledge. The mission here is different to Japan, really. They go and win F1 world championships, so they’re the best in the world. And [Toyoharu] Tanabe-San, the technical director there, used to work here.”

Honda motorsport manager Chuck Schifsky adds: “I think there are two big misnomers about us – the first is that this programme is overseen by Japan and that David does everything they tell him to. He actually reports straight to our North American CEO Mr [Noriya] Kaihara.

“The second is that our operation is exactly the same as Chevy’s, especially in IndyCar, where Ilmor is their partner. There is not another building, with another name on it, that is making all of our engine components for us.”

HPD’s staff level is running at a record high of 250 after, Salters says, “we decided it was a great idea to do new IndyCar and current IndyCar, plus DPi and new GTP all at the same point”, so an extra 100 staff were effectively brought onboard in six months.

“Four projects meant more firepower, but that number will come and go,” he adds.

Schifsky (left) and Salters work independently of Honda in Japan

Photo by: Michael L. Levitt / Motorsport Images

Our tour of the factory starts at the assembly shop, where 20 or more engines are in various stages of build in the bays. One thing jumps out immediately: there are many more powerplants covered with red dust jackets (IndyCar units) than blue ones (IMSA units) – a simple, yet effective, way of avoiding confusion when not being worked on! – and we’ve arrived in mid-April just as the Indianapolis 500 qualifying motors are being crafted.

Next door is another huge production room that’s crammed with humming CNC machinery, where the engine parts are created. These machines can