Formula 1’s Aston Martin team principal Adrian Newey says his group was blindsided by the fact its then-incoming works power unit partner Honda had only retained about 30% of its original world championship-winning staff going into the project.
Sounds like things at Honda have been a mess for longer than anyone but the heads of Aston Martin knew of.
Honda’s UK team was for the hybrid unit, the Mercedes HPP poaches for the ICE. That’s well known. In fact, only a year ago (pretty late) Honda bought back their original UK factory from Red Bull https://www.motorsport-total.com/formel-1/news/fabrik-von-red-bull-uebernommen-honda-legt-wieder-in-europa-los-25030404 (in German, the first source I could find).