Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsHonda

Honda has 'bigger targets' than testing showed

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Honda's new head of F1 project Yusuke Hasegawa says the power unit manufacturer will still not be satisfied with clear progress this season.

McLaren was able to run reliably throughout pre-season testing this year in a major improvement compared to Honda's first year back in F1 in 2015. While the step forward in reliability was clear to see, Hasegawa told F1i during an exclusive interview that being in the midfield is not his target.

“As we are always saying, it is very difficult to tell from the test results," Hasegawa said. "But I am not very optimistic about performance. We were around seventh and sixth; it is not very good. It is good compared to last year, but it is not very good. So I am not satisfied with that. We have bigger targets still.”

And asked if last year's difficulties had led to Honda changing those targets, Hasegawa replied: “No, not at all.

"Of course our final target is to get a championship, we do not change that target. We made some of the steps we planned for, but last year we didn’t define particular steps. For this year we may set very realistic targets which is to be consistent to get race points.”

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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.