Pulling out of Formula One could cost Honda £100 million if the Japanese manufacturer fails to offload its UK-based team. Industry experts were last night calculating the price of Honda’s decision to leave the sport and believe that the company will face a huge bill unless it can find a buyer.

Apart from paying as much as £24 million in compensation to Jenson Button, the driver who had just signed a new three-year contract, the company will be faced with redundancy packages for the 700 staff, some of whom are among the industry’s highest earners. Then there will be the disposal of the futuristic factory in Brackley, Northamptonshire, and high-tech machinery as well as the termination of contracts with dozens of suppliers.

Industry watchers say that Honda will be lucky to get away with spending £100 million to back out of the sport. But the company is also leaving turmoil in its wake, with sponsors left in the lurch. Petrobras, the Brazilian petrol producer, had dumped Williams to join Honda in what was believed to be a deal worth $20 million a year (now about £13.5 million). Executives discovered that the Honda team were out of business just hours before they were due to join them.

A leading electronics company, believed to be Honeywell, was also expecting to join the Honda set-up, widely predicted to be on course for success after four years in the doldrums thanks to the recruitment as team principal of Ross Brawn, the former technical director of Benetton and Ferrari, who had steered Michael Schumacher to seven Formula One world titles. He, too, is on a long-term contract, with a salary thought to be about £4 million.

Nick Fry, the Honda chief executive, is confident that a buyer for the team will be found before the company’s new-year deadline. But David Richards, the managing director of Prodrive, the motorsport engineering group, who has been linked with a takeover, pointed out the problems facing any potential buyer.

“It’s not about buying it,” he said. “It is all very well making the commitment to buy it because I don’t think that will be too onerous. The real issue is to make sure you have the resources to sustain it.”

Some marketing experts were suggesting turning the Formula One team into the spearhead for an environmental campaign, masterminded by Simon Fuller, the head of 19 Entertainment, as one reason for Honda’s decision to leave the highest-spending sport in the world.

The man who launched the Spice Girls and guided David Beckham to untold riches was behind the Earth Dream plan, which involved clearing the Honda cars of sponsor logos and replacing them with a superimposed map of the world. That meant that Honda effectively bore the entire £270 million annual cost of running the team, while the company is now looking for buyers without sponsors as collateral to help to fund it.

Chris Lightfoot, managing director of Whitestone International, which has the FA and the ECB on its client roster, said: “Was the Earth Dream idea a good one? You wonder whether the public really got it and whether Honda’s message somehow got lost in the noise of Formula One.

“People inside businesses get very enthusiastic about these sorts of projects but the real evaluation is whether the message cut through and I am not sure it did.”

The speed of Honda’s departure will put a substantial dent in the reputation of a company that not only took pride in its motor-racing history but thought of itself as one of the most adventurous carmakers. But company executives clearly realise that a new buyer will not be able to walk in and easily start running an operation that was burning money faster than Button could drive a lap of Silverstone.

Max Mosley, the president of the FIA, motor sport’s governing body, broke off from talks with Formula One teams yesterday in Monaco, aimed at slashing the sport’s costs, to disclose that Honda was committed to helping the new owners.

“If a serious buyer came along, Honda would help to keep it going,” Mosley said. “Any person would then be on their own in 2010, but they would get some help in 2009. It becomes a reasonable proposition for an entrepreneur, providing he is satisfied we, the FIA, are going to get the costs down in 2010.”