Pros
Super fun work, extremely engaging technical problems. high level of autonomy and freedom, extremely bright engineers, financial backing of North American Honda gives more stability than most racing organizations
Cons
The Technical Director has no concern or respect for 95% of the people in the company, There is a small group of his favorite employees, which are always given all the responsibilities and spotlight. Coincidentally, his favorite people are frequently young attractive women. He started an obvious relationship with a woman in Procurement, then she happened to be promoted very soon after that. It's their business what they do in personal life, but the fact that it was displayed publicly, then obviously correlated to her promotion shows the lack of integrity and prejudice.
The company culture has fallen since the President was promoted and completed crashed when he appointed the Technical Director. Before that point, HPD/HRC was an incredible place to work. The benefits/salaries never improved (it sucks compared to other SoCal tech companies), but everyone was generally content and excited to get to work because we all had a common goal. And there was a huge sense of collaboration and concern for other people- coming from management and peers.
Now, they promote a culture where whoever beats their chest loudest is promoted and praised. The people who focus on the work and achieve incredible things in silence are completely ignored. There is also a huge inter- departmental warfare going on because of the high-strung, cutthroat culture. Department managers actively trash talk other teams and are more concerned with proving their ideas are better to increase their responsibilities
The tech director is the most reactive "leader" I have ever encountered. There is zero project planning or risk assessment taking place. As soon as something goes wrong, he assigns blame to anyone but himself. He causes huge chaos and stress in everyone involved in the project- as if they didn't already care about their work or understand how important it is. He commands everyone to work 12hr days and weekends, even though he is nowhere to be found after 4:30PM and never comes in for more than 15 minutes on any weekend.
HR lies about the level at which engineers enter at to convince them to sign the offer. They use the line "the salary isn't very good but you'll make a lot more with overtime". But then mgmt spends the budget so overtime is forbidden until the next dumpster fire. Then you have to put your life and family on hold to fix it.