Jenson Button's sixth place in the Austrian Grand Prix showed the true strength of Honda's recent power unit upgrade, according to Yusuke Hasegawa.
After impressing in a rain-hit qualifying session on Saturday, Button started from third on the grid and duly moved up to second place at the start of the race. Having kept Kimi Raikkonen at bay for a number of laps at the start, Button dropped back slightly as the race progressed but still finished sixth behind only Mercedes, Red Bull and Raikkonen.
Asked if he felt Austria was Honda's most competitive race to date since returning to F1 at the start of 2015, Hasegawa replied: “Yeah, I do think so.
"I think Jenson made a very good race, even with Williams and a Force India as well. So it was very encouraging.
"I think since we have introduced the new turbine, but Canada and Azerbaijan are too competitive from a power point of view. So I think we’ve come back to a normal circuit I think so that is the reason why we can prove that our update was working well, I think."
And Honda's head of F1 project believes starting high up on the grid allowed Button to display the car's true pace more easily than if he was in the lower midfield.
“And also the motivation is very good, so Jenson kept a high motivation I think because of the position, so that was one of the effects I think.
"He was also surprised that he could protect the position from a Ferrari.”
While Button excelled, team-mate Fernando Alonso was forced to retire with an energy store problem.
"We saw some system failure detected, but we haven’t understood what happened exactly. It also stopped some of the deployment and he needed to recover the system. It happened twice so we decided to call the car back because the worst case is some electrical issue. But we didn’t know that.”
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