Honda still targeting points at Spa and Monza

Honda believes it can still target points at power-dominated circuits such as Spa and Monza as it aims for the top ten at every race weekend.

McLaren has shown improved competitiveness since Honda introduced upgrades this season, with the team scoring in six of the past nine races. Honda's head of F1 project Yusuke Hasegawa has called the progress made by the team "incredible", and he is hoping to continue the momentum at the next two circuits despite the emphasis being placed on the power unit in both Belgium and Italy.

"Spa and Monza will surely be difficult, Spa is long, power-hungry and technical, and Monza is mostly full-throttle, so it is different from a track like Silverstone where it is still fast but all-round technical circuit," Hasegawa told F1i.

"I am not sure what the power effect on these circuits will be, but I don’t think we should be writing off points, so we will see how the weekends go."

And Hasegawa says the optimism is based on a target to score points at every circuit from now until the end of the season.

"We haven’t changed our target, and that is to get into Q3 consistently, hopefully with both cars going forward. We have proven that we can be the 4^th best team depending on the race weekend, so we want to be consistently at that level and always be targeting points."

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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.