22/08/2017
NEWS STORY
Last month, Honda's Yusuke Hasegawa admitted that many of the reliability and performance issues with its power unit only became apparent once it hit the track; the Japanese manufacturer having finally discovered disparity between the results of dyno testing and the reality of the race circuit.
Ahead of the second half of the season, and in the wake of McLaren's first double-points finish of the year, Hasegawa has revealed that the company is to change its approach and rely less on the results of dyno testing.
"We are changing our way of development," he told Motorsport.com. "We're not too much insisting on mono-cylinder (dyno) development.
"We can check factors or elements or many concepts with the mono-cylinder," he continued, "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."
In particular, the MGU-H has been an issue, with both Fernando Alonso and Stoffel Vandoorne suffering a number of failures.
However, updates introduced at Silverstone appear to suggest that the issue might finally be resolved.
"The MGU-H failure took a very long time to solve," admitted 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 issue, we just need to confirm on the circuit. The MGU-H specification we have introduced includes solutions for the problem so I believe it's OK."