Honda willing to risk reliability for performance

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Honda is willing to risk reliability in search of major performance gains as it ponders its next power unit update.

McLaren enjoyed a run of reaching Q3 at three consecutive races from Spain to Canada, but finished 11th in both Montreal and Baku despite a turbo upgrade delivering a step forward in performance. Honda head of F1 project Yusuke Hasegawa says reliability considerations are taken into account when searching for the next upgrade, but will not prevent Honda introducing any developments which provide clear progress in terms of power.

“Actually at this moment I do care but I don’t care too much about the reliability," Hasegawa said. "If we have enough performance then we will introduce it. There’s no reason to hesitate to introduce it in this kind of situation. Of course we have to have the confidence to finish one race!"

And Hasegawa says no major update to the internal combustion engine has been introduced yet because Honda does not have a development worth enough performance.

“It is very simple, we don't have enough performance in an update so we can’t introduce it. We are not ready, we don’t have any ideal parts for that. It is very simple.

“Because we don’t have enough time to change everything - we don’t have enough tokens - so we will just introduce some of the additive parts. But we will of course. In some of the individual experimental tests we see some of the benefits, but we can’t prove it as a complete engine.”

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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.