Honda progress worth around 0.3s

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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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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.