Honda wants to introduce upgrades in Canada

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Honda wants to introduce an upgrade at the Canadian Grand Prix but will make a final decision at the end of this week.

McLaren finished the Monaco Grand Prix with Fernando Alonso in fifth and Jenson Button ninth, but admitted it was unhappy with the overall performance despite the encouraging result. Head of F1 project Yusuke Hasegawa says Canada is a race where he wants to upgrade the power unit having yet to spend any tokens doing so, but a final decision will not be made until the end of the week.

“There is no doubt that power is very important for Canada, which is a very stop and go circuit," Hasegawa said. "Fuel consumption is also very important. I want to introduce some of the updates of course. We want to but we can’t decide, we can’t tell. So we will try to prepare.

“Even just a 1% improvement or a 10% improvement we still need to use the same tokens, so in that case we would want to choose the 10% upgrade.”

Asked if Honda is close to introducing the upgrades, Hasegawa replied: “Yes.

"Some of the updates that we have run in Sakura on the dyno I have seen have good results. The thing we have to do is confirm that technology is OK and the durability and the logistics to prepare.”

The main focus of Honda's development has been around the turbocharger and internal combustion engine (ICE).

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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.