Here’s how Honda helped the US Olympic bobsled and skeleton teams go faster – Jalopnik

Bobsled and Skeleton are one of those Olympics where an athlete needs to be in top form, but that alone won’t win the gold medal. These are athletes, just like racing drivers, who must be attuned to their equipment, and perfectly designed to achieve a few hundredths of a second more than everyone else.

For the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina, Honda and Acura are partnering with Team USA to provide technical and development assistance. Although these human-gravity-powered skating rockets are not powered by engines, they share many similarities with Honda’s decades of winning motorsports programs. To start, Honda helped Team USA develop their sleds at the company’s Honda Automotive Laboratories of Ohio (HALO) facility.

“We’re applying the same mentality we apply to cars,” said Mike Unger, director of HALO Windtunnel. With an accuracy that even an Olympic team cannot measure, Honda engineers helped the team manufacture its sleds to the level allowed by the rules. It is a holistic approach, because the team can immediately see the best way to not only build the sled itself, but also how to sit in the sled as a team for the best aerodynamic effect. And that can change from corner to corner, using the positioning of a moving body to best navigate its way through a corner. This is deep stuff, man.

This is the kind of research and development that a team of Olympians simply cannot do alone. This is dedicated technical work that is usually beyond the reach of the athletes themselves.

“As the pilot at the front of the sled, I can have quite a bit of influence on the aerodynamics. I learn where to place my head for positioning, helmet tilt, some really important things,” says Frank Del Duca, bobsled driver for Team USA Two-man and Four-man events. “I’m trying to find that hundredth of a second or two as I go down the track.”

The U.S. bobsled team won the women’s monobob gold and silver medals at the 2022 Beijing Games, and the two-women’s sled team found silver in Pyeongchang, but the men haven’t seen a podium finish since Sochi in 2014. Similarly, both the men’s and women’s skeleton teams have failed to reach the podium since 2014. Hopefully, with some help from Honda, the Americans can compete with the German favorites (who are helped by BMW).

Honda says the Olympic sleds will wear Acura badging to indicate that this is a premium Honda project, while also indicating that this is a North American effort by the engineers here, and not a Japanese one. Leave it to the best engineers in Ohio to build something great for the world stage.