McLaren to get new technology from Honda

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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