Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsHonda

Honda confident in Spa upgrade reliability

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Honda is confident it will be able to deal with any reliability problems it faces with its upgraded power unit at the Belgian Grand Prix, according to Yasuhisa Arai.

McLaren’s engine partner suffered from a number of unforeseen issues after spending two tokens on power unit development at the Canadian Grand Prix earlier this year, and was only able to extract more performance in the last two races as it scored in both Great Britain and Hungary. With another major update planned for Spa-Francorchamps, Arai told F1i he is confident there will not be a repeat.

“We have already fixed things, you know [in Hungary] we had very hot weather but we didn’t have any problems,” Arai said. “We have confidence about the reliability so we are stepping up the power side. Spa, Monza and the next few races are more power circuits.”

With McLaren scoring points with both cars in Hungary - the first time it has managed such a result in 2015 - Arai says it was a welcome boost for the whole team but reserved a special mention for Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button.

“It’s just the middle point of the season and we got points with both drivers at the last race, so we are very, very encouraged - not only on the power unit side, but on the chassis side also. There are many people who work for the Formula One team who are very encouraged, but especially I want to say thank you very much to the two drivers.”

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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.