Alonso: Honda 'more logical' in 2016

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Fernando Alonso says Honda's approach is "more logical" in 2016 following a change to the management structure at the engine manufacturer.

Yasuhisa Arai was replaced by Yusuke Hasegawa as Honda's head of F1 project at the start of the season, and Hasegawa has overseen a more productive year so far with McLaren already having scored five more points than in the whole of 2015.

Alonso attributes the improved performance to the maturity of the project, as Honda is set to spent development tokens for the second time this season with an internal combustion engine upgrade at Silverstone this weekend.

“I think it feels much better, it feels much more normal," Alonso said. "Everything is more logical, more racing team, with all the facilities working 100 per cent with more people in the factory in Sakura. I saw before, in the presentation of the race, the pre-race meeting, that we have the same engines of Mercedes, three units used so far in the championship, which was quite a surprise.

"Definitely everything seems more logical, we are more ready for this challenge. Last year we were just too immature, the project. I’m more optimistic now but still a long way to go in terms of power. I think we have reliability more or less in line with the others, deployment-wise I think we are also at the level of the top teams but in terms of power, we are still missing a lot of it and we are still working very hard on that.”

And Alonso is expecting McLaren to show further progress as a result of Honda's latest update in Silverstone.

“Yeah definitely, I expect another step in performance, especially in the engine side, the car is basically similar, or the same as Austria, but the characteristics of the components is probably is a little bit better for us and then extra power, hopefully we can be more competitive and get back into the points, which I miss from Monaco. Canada, Azerbaijan and Austria were a little bit of bad luck and some errors and mistakes we did, so this is the race where hopefully we change this situation and come back to our normal standards.”

Chris Medland's 2016 British Grand Prix preview

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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.