Jenson Button says Honda has made "massive" progress with one of its weakest areas over the winter.
Honda is running a new specification of power unit during the second pre-season test which is close to what will be used at the first race of the season in Australia. Button drove the update for the first time on Wednesday and talking specifically about the ERS deployment says he has noticed a clear difference.
“The progress is massive in that area," Button said. "That’s something we knew we had to work on. Deployment is not something we could have worked massively on last year with the compressor but over the winter we’ve been able to and Honda have done a great job in terms of bringing that to testing.
"We’ve had no reliability issues with it at all and it’s a big difference. On some circuits in a race we were losing 0.6s last year every lap because we didn’t have deployment. Now the system’s working well and I think from here on it’s marginal gains really compared to our competitors. So it’s a good step forward and a necessary step forward.”
Putting the Honda upgrade in context, Button feels it as the most clear step forward since the Japanese manufacturer returned to F1.
“I would say it’s the biggest improvement that I’ve felt with the power unit over the last 14 months, which is good. I think the improvement is good but obviously we’re still a long way off of the other guys and you can see that in the speed traps. But you can definitely feel the difference in the initial part on the straights.
"I think the important thing is we’re able to do quite a few laps, we were held up a little but by a few little niggly things today and some red flags but I felt that we could have done a lot more laps today and I think it shows the reliability, which is really important. We’ve got that sorted I think, fingers crossed. So we can really, really push the performance with the power unit and that is what is happening.”
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