Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsHonda

Honda aims to gauge full performance in second test

Honda's aim remains to find out the full performance of its new power unit in the MP4-31 during next week's second pre-season test.

After an encouraging start to the first test during which McLaren was able to complete 203 laps over the first two days, reliability issues hit on Wednesday and Thursday limiting the team to only 54 further laps in total.

A closer look at the McLaren-Honda MP4-31

New head of the F1 project Yusuke Hasegawa says the difficult finish to the test should not detract from the good work Honda managed to achieve at the start of the week, with the engine manufacturer still planning to push its power unit to its full performance in the second test.

"Our track time [on Thursday] was severely limited due to a coolant leak issue, which required more time than expected to find and rectify," Hasegawa said.

“To summarise our first four days of testing, we had a positive start, with confirmation of the improvement of the ERS deployment. However, the latter days revealed that there are areas of the power unit reliability that we need to work on to prepare for Australia onwards.

“In the second test next week, we are aiming to gauge the full performance of the car.”

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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.