Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsHonda

Honda keen to accelerate development after break

Honda wants to spend the majority of its power unit development tokens for the four races following the mid-season break.

Following a difficult start to the year, Honda used two tokens to update its power unit ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix but struggled with reliability issues. With more encouraging signs at Silverstone, Honda motorsport boss Yasuhisa Arai told F1i the focus is now on making use of the seven remaining tokens for the races which follow the Hungarian Grand Prix.

"We have got two big power circuits in Spa and Monza but also the remaining seven races [after that], so we want to apply more power to the performance side to get better positions in the second half of the season," Arai said.

Having said any updates for Hungary are uncertain, when asked if an engine upgrade will be required for the Belgian Grand Prix, Arai replied: "It's not exactly decided yet, but one target is Spa and also Singapore is very important for us.

"Singapore is very important for McLaren-Honda, so we want to apply improvements for those three or four races, because after Singapore is Suzuka, our home circuit, which is very important too.

"So we want to use the tokens for several races and get more performance, applying them to get more competitiveness."

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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.