From the racetrack to the streets

After a two-year pause, racing is finally back in Toronto. Over the last several weeks, I’ve felt a renewed level of energy and excitement from our team. Many are avid INDYCAR fans who long to be trackside while others are eager to be surrounded by the people, sights and sounds that the Honda Indy Toronto offers. Needless to say, we’re proud to be involved in Canada’s only stop on the INDYCAR circuit but that’s not the only reason why we race.

Our founder, Soichiro Honda once said that if Honda doesn’t race, there is no Honda. To put this another way, our work on the track and our production vehicles will forever be linked. And the connection that ties them together is what we call our “Challenging Spirit.”

This Challenging Spirit is a commitment to constantly challenge ourselves. To analyze and pull things apart. To break things and then remake them. To learn. To always be better.

And this spirit applies equally to racing and to our production vehicles. For consumers, it comes to life in every innovation. In new body safety structures. In new systems that conserve fuel and in engines that exceed industry accepted durability standards.

For racing, every track we visit—including the 11-turn, 2.8-kilometre course through downtown Toronto—is a very public spectacle where we put our ideas to the test, troubleshoot and learn. Here, our Challenging Spirit is also driving innovation. This past March, Honda Performance Development began testing a new hybrid racing engine at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. By all accounts, the tests were successful, bringing us that much closer to seeing full hybrid engines, similar to what’s found throughout our vehicle line-up, make their official INDYCAR series introduction in 2024.

We built our first hybrid powertrains in 2000. I can’t tell you how exciting it is to see racing follow, taking this big leap forward. And to do so in a way that mirrors Honda’s own path to electrification.

I’ve been asked whether the Honda vehicles that Canadians love so much are direct descendants of our race cars. The answer is not exactly. But I can say that vehicles like the Civic and CR-V were born of the same Challenging Spirit as the cars that will be racing through the streets of downtown Toronto next week. And that’s something we at Honda are extremely proud of.

Good luck to all the drivers on July 17!