Nakamoto joined the
Honda Racing Corporation in 1983 and his initial work was based around the corporation's
motorcycle racing operations at
Honda Racing Corporation (HRC). By 1984, Nakamoto was already project leader on the design of the Honda RS125 and RS250 production racing machines. By 1990 he had been moved up to the role of large project leader on both these machines. Nakamoto continued to work with motorcycles, but moved to the
Honda F1 project in 2000. He gained multiple promotions up until 2002 when he became the race and test team manager for
Honda Racing Developments Ltd. (HRD). Another promotion in 2003 led to him becoming engineering director for Honda Racing Developments Ltd., and he stayed in this role until 2006. During 2006, Nakamoto got his big break being appointed the Senior Technical Director for the Honda F1 team, taking over from
Geoff Willis, an
aerodynamics specialist. The
Honda RA107, the first Formula One car designed under Nakamoto, was very poor, mainly due to bad aerodynamics. The RA107 was even inferior to the
Super Aguri SA07, a re-worked model of Willis'
Honda RA106 from the
previous season. Various explanations have been proposed for why the car performed so poorly. One was that the
wind tunnel which was set up in July, 2006 broke at almost the same time that
Geoff Willis was replaced by Nakamoto. Thus, the new car had been designed using a faulty wind tunnel. To try to fix the aerodynamics problems Honda employed a number of new aerodynamicists including
Loïc Bigois,
John Owen (ex-
BMW Sauber), Nakamoto left the Honda F1 team and returned to
HRC as the vice-president where he serves as the team principal of the
Repsol Honda MotoGP team. He retired in November 2016. ==Personal life==