Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsHonda

Honda seeking more power for Canada

Honda will look to get more performance from the MGU-K in order to be competitive at the Canadian Grand Prix.

The race in Montreal takes place on the high speed Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, which features a very long straight in the final sector. With much of the lap spent at full throttle, Honda’s current power deficit is likely to be exposed and motorsport boss Yasuhisa Arai admits the engine manufacturer will need to focus on other areas as well as outright horsepower.

Asked about the challenge of needing more power in upcoming races, Arai joked: “Please give me the power!

“Canada is a power circuit so we need more power but it’s also one of the stop-go circuits, so braking and energy recovery is also very important. So we have to improve to give more drivability.

“More power we need, I know that, but it’s not so easy to get more horsepower. How to deliver the MGU-K power at that kind of fast, high speed circuit is what we will think about.”

And with Honda yet to use any tokens, Arai says the focus is on making sure they are the most effective changes for this season.

“[Canada] will be more challenging, but we don’t have any plan yet and we haven’t decided yet when we will use the tokens. It depends on our strategy and discussing it with McLaren. Maybe finally we will decide.

“Which areas and which part is how many tokens we already knew, but we need to work out which area is most important for the remaining 13 races, so we don’t decide yet.”

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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.