17/05/2016
NEWS STORY
Yusuke Hasegawa, the head of Honda's F1 project, who last week admitted that the Japanese manufacturer intends to use its (14) remaining engine development tokens for a limited number of major upgrades as opposed to a series of smaller, less significant changes, has confirmed that an upgrade is not imminent.
Indeed, he confirmed that only minimal updates to the Honda unit will be tried at this week's test at Barcelona.
"Although we are developing all the time, if we don't care about tokens we are ready to update," he told Motorsport.com. "I need to decide the tactics about which grand prix we have upgrades, so I cannot tell yet. We have no concrete plan."
Asked what will be tested at Barcelona, he admitted: "There is not a big hardware update, but there are some control items."
Mobil is understood to have a new fuel available for Canada next month, and with Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button scheduled to take on new engines for the event, might Montreal see an upgrade?
"We don't need to use tokens for the fuel updates," said Hasegawa. "Any time that it is ready, if we change the fuel we have to change the mapping: so also it is reasonable and effective to have the update timing to this as well.
"We haven't decide when the next engine will come but first we need to check Fernando's engine is okay for Monaco," he added, referring to the Spaniard's Spanish GP unit which suffered a software issue.
"We think it is fine. It was an unexpected mode switch that killed the engine. We don't know the cause of that happening, but we think the engine itself can be used for the next race. We need to check the situation."