Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsMcLaren

McLaren to get new technology from Honda

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McLaren racing director Eric Boullier says there will be “some new technology” in the Honda power unit at the next race in Spain.

Honda has struggled since returning to F1 at the start of the year, with its new power unit proving to be unreliable and severely limiting mileage throughout pre-season and during the opening four races. However, Boullier has already highlighted the potential for improvement when a new specification of power unit is introduced in Barcelona.

Following the Bahrain Grand Prix - where Fernando Alonso finished 11th but Jenson Button failed to start - Boullier says there will be new technology in the power unit in Spain which will allow McLaren to get more performance out of the Honda engine.

“You can do some progress because McLaren and Honda are now really operating like one team, which is good,” Boullier said. “Obviously a lot of progress is being done on mapping because these engines have a lot to extract in terms of performance in mapping, be it fuel efficiency, power, drivability, engine deployment … there are many, many mappings now.

“This part of the McLaren-Honda team is now operating at a good level, still not what we want, but at a good level. So we can extract some performance more quickly and for Barcelona we should have some new technology in the engine which will allow us to play with these toys a little bit more, so theoretically getting some more performance out of the car.”

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.