08/09/2006
NEWS STORY
Following a disastrous day on which neither of its race drivers completed a single lap, and test driver Anthony Davidson completed just 10, suffering two major engine failures, Honda has opted a change of plan.
The Japanese team had originally planned to run the latest version of its engine in Sunday's Grand Prix, with an eye on homologation for 2007. However, the two failures suffered on Friday, has caused the team to revert to the previous spec unit, as used in Turkey.
By introducing the 2007 spec engine early, the Brackley based team would have had a couple of races in which to develop the unit, before handing it over to the FIA following the China GP. The audacious plan ended in smoke and flames at the Curva Grande on Friday... twice.
"It's an indication of how hard we're pushing," said Nick Fry, according to Reuters. "After winning, we said we wanted to finish the year strongly and we're pulling out all the stops, and that includes being quite adventurous on the engine front.
"The engine that we've got here has got some fairly substantial differences from the engine we ran previously," he continued, "and it's obvious from what happened today that, for reasons we don't yet understand, something's not quite right.
"In terms of lost running time today, it's nothing like as bad as it could have been," he insisted. "We've paid the price of being very adventurous but it's far from being a disaster."
"Obviously we had a difficult day," added Sporting Director, Gil de Ferran. "Therefore we elected not to run the race cars. Needless to say this has not been the best start to the weekend for us as we collected very little data today about cars and tyres, however thankfully we were testing here a week ago so the set-up of the car and tyre choice are more dialled-in than they would otherwise be."
Because neither race driver ran in either session, there will be no penalties.
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