Honda opposes McLaren's recruitment requests

Honda has told McLaren it will continue to recruit personnel according to its own philosophy rather than the European approach.

McLaren openly encouraged Honda to attempt to recruit engineers from rivals such as Mercedes, Ferrari or Renault in order to speed up its recovery from a difficult start to 2015. However, Honda motorsport boss Yasuhisa Arai says he told McLaren it is not an approach the Japanese manufacturer will take, despite understanding the reasons for the request.

"We thoroughly discuss problems until we see eye to eye," Arai told the Nikkei Asian Review. "The talks are neither cozy nor confrontational. Sometime around last summer, they asked if we had sufficient [development] resources and wanted to know why we were doing things exclusively on our own.

"They also asked us to use outside personnel, which from their perspective is natural given the high job mobility in Europe.

"But we explained that Honda has a different philosophy. It's important to nurture manpower. It isn't acceptable to us to have an outside engineer stay for just three months or half a year."

McLaren and Honda have a works partnership and will continue to work exclusively together in 2016, despite Red Bull requesting an engine supplier from Honda at one stage towards the end of last year.

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