Tense relations between McLaren and Honda

For two years, the official message has been that everything is fine between McLaren and Honda. The two partners have thus chosen the opposite communication strategy to that of Red Bull with Renault, which has continually blamed its engine supplier for its lack of performance and reliability, to the point of finding a title sponsor for this engine in order not even to mention Renault’s name.

But things do not seem to be improving on the track as the new engine developed by Honda still appears just as unreliable, and its performance seems far from that of its rivals. Thus, in the first five days of winter testing, Honda has already installed six different engines, which is significantly more than what is allowed for the 19 races of the upcoming season.

The new problems encountered during this first day of the second week have provoked strong reactions from Eric Boullier, the racing director of the team: “We are in F1, we are here to race. We need to be competitive. The pressure is obviously enormous. We have put maximum pressure on all aspects of our relationship with Honda, and so have they. We cannot afford to make mistakes. We need to be able to provide the best car. It goes both ways.”

But it is clear that things are not improving: on Tuesday alone, Stoffel Vandoorne completed 80 laps while Sebastian Vettel and Felipe Massa were able to do more than double (168). For Eric Boullier, this still provides enough data to make decisions, but an F1 team never has enough data: « I think our job is to understand and develop the car and validate some parts. The process is to generate as much data as possible and send it back to a machine in Woking to demonstrate that the correlation works. Obviously, we would like to have more laps, but the correlation is good, and we can make decisions. I am not worried yet. »

But with the accumulated delay each day, the team already knows it will not be able to complete the program established during the off-season, even after it was revised following last week’s issues. All eyes are now on Honda, which must find a quick solution to its problems: « For the rest, we must ensure that Honda properly studies the problem and resolves it properly. We must rely on our partner. We are running with the same specifications as last week. This does not mean we have not made any changes to the engine. I think the next version should solve this problem or at least most of it. »

We have already experienced more overwhelming enthusiasm regarding a partner that funds a large part of the team’s program…

With the participation of www.racingbusiness.fr