Honda: McLaren progress has been 'incredible'

Honda's head of F1 project Yusuke Hasegawa says the engine manufacturer and McLaren have made "incredible" progress since the end of 2015.

The first season of the rekindled partnership was a difficult one as McLaren-Honda scored just 27 points and finished ninth out of the ten teams in the constructors' championship. However, a much more competitive 2016 so far has seen McLaren already score 42 points and Hasegawa says promises are being delivered on.

"Looking at the genuine progress we have made as Honda and as a team is incredible," Hasegawa told F1i. "I have always said that we have focused on three things since last year, reliability, ERS, and ICE.

"Reliability has gotten much better and we should praise the team for their hard work on this throughout the winter months and during the first half of the season. We have updated both the ERS and ICE during the season, and they are both working as I hoped they would.

"However, purely from a race result perspective, we are not satisfied with where we are. Our target is to be consistently in Q3 and in the points. At the moment, our race pace is getting much better, but we are still inconsistent in achieving these goals so we need to keep pushing forward our progress."

McLaren has reached Q3 on six occasions so far this season - including with both cars in Hungary - and has scored points in three of the final four races before the summer break.

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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.