Honda is shaking up its top leadership ahead of the motorsport season, with current president and CEO Koji Watanabe set to retire, as The Race reports. Watanabe, who helped manage the manufacturer's official return to Formula 1, will step down and be replaced as the head of Honda Racing Corporation by Keiichi Yasuda on January 1. This transition arrives slightly earlier than the standard April timing for executive-level changes to better align with the racing calendar.
Yasuda currently serves as HRC's executive vice president and representative director. Like his predecessor, he is a company veteran who has been with Honda since 1990. Prior to joining HRC in 2026, Yasuda rose to the top position in Honda's human resources division, coming from the human resources side with a distinct interest in the company's motorcycle activities.
Watanabe’s tenure at the helm of HRC included overseeing Honda’s official F1 return under the new 2026 engine regulations. A long-serving company man who previously climbed the ranks on the communications and marketing side within Honda, Watanabe took on the HRC job as part of a 2022 restructuring that unified the brand's car and motorcycle racing programmes under a single entity. That position placed him at the center of Honda's enduring relationship with Red Bull through the end of 2025, followed by the new engine project with Aston Martin this year. However, the key strategic decisions that left the brand on the back foot were made before Watanabe took charge.
Honda's formal return to F1 has been dismal, characterized by a lack of performance that followed chronic reliability problems during testing and the early races. That struggle stems largely from Honda's previous, shaky commitment to the sport—specifically the damaging decision to officially withdraw at the end of 2021 before continuing merely as a service partner managing frozen engines for Red Bull from 2022 to 2025. When the board ultimately decided to re-commit to F1 for the 2026 rule changes, the manufacturer had to revive a project that had previously been gutted to redistribute engineers elsewhere.
The fallout from those prior choices has been tangible. Aston Martin revealed late last year that it only discovered how drastically different the current Honda project was compared to the manufacturer's more successful era with Red Bull. Honda explains that the upcoming 2027 leadership change is occurring as part of a planned periodic personnel rotation. The company states it is designed to strengthen the management structure in response to global transformation and to accelerate business expansion for the next generation.
