Honda head of F1 project Yusuke Hasegawa believes the engine manufacturer has found around 0.3s without upgrades since the start of the season.
Following a disappointing return to F1 last year, Honda focused largely on its energy recovery systems and reliability ahead of this season. While it has yet to spend any development tokens to upgrade the power unit from a performance point of view, Hasegawa says Honda has made clear progress just by optimising the package it has.
“Of course we don’t introduce any upgrades or hardware, but from just a settings change point of view I think we have already introduced a few tenths - three tenths or something from the engine," Hasegawa told F1i.
"It’s quite encouraging, it’s not natural to improve just with the power unit, especially just the settings. But vice versa that means we didn’t start with the best engine settings in Melbourne!”
Despite the progress, Hasegawa believes Honda has almost maximised the potential from the current specification and will now need to develop the hardware to find more performance.
"I think with the current specification we are squeezing the maximum power from the engine. Actually although we are using the same specification since Melbourne we are squeezing more and more power, so I think we are almost achieving maximum power.
“To improve the maximum power we may need some upgrades, some new parts or some new combustion. From a control settings point of view I think we are achieving the maximum already.”
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