Yusuke Hasegawa Engine lead for F1 says Honda is changing the evaluation method to assess the engine development. After a frustrating first half of 2017 and ever growing dissatisfaction of its F1 partner McLaren, Honda has been working hard to fix the reliability and power issues.
Honda struggled with the correlation between the dyno and the track. Since then, has taken a different approach, relying less on the dyno results to verify a specification, Hasegawa said.
Talking to Motorsport, he said, “We are changing our way of development. We’re not too much insisting on mono-cylinder [dyno] development.
“We can check factors or elements or many concepts with the mono-cylinder [block] but we now understand we need to check with the V6 to finalise our specification.
“So we are no longer relying too much on the mono-cylinder results. As a reference, the mono cylinder test is important but to find the performance, we need to check the V6 results.”
Honda faced quite a few failures with the MGU-H this season. But after reliability update at Silverstone Hasegawa believes they have finally sorted the issue.
“The MGU-H failure took a very long time to solve,” said Hasegawa. “We had many small issues in the engine – and that area is difficult to understand on the dyno.
“We are about to solve that [MGU-H] issue, we just need to confirm on the circuit.
“But the MGU-H specification we have introduced includes solutions for the problem so I believe it’s OK.”
