Soon-to-be former Honda Formula 1 boss Yusuke Hasegawa is confident the Japanese manufacturer will enjoy better reliability with their engines in 2018.
This season, the performance was badly impacted after flaws were discovered in the heavily revised design to bring their engine philosophy more in line with the other suppliers on the grid.
Those problems would ultimately see McLaren end their partnership with Honda after just three seasons, however, in the second half of the year, progress on both the performance and reliability did allow the British team to score points at five of the last seven races.
“Our performance improvement level is something to be proud of,” Hasegawa, who will move on to become Chief Engineer at Honda next year, told Motorsport.com.
Related Stories:
- Toro Rosso to increase team operation as part of Honda partnership
- McLaren: “Never say never” to working with Honda again
- Honda anticipate “more equal” role in Toro Rosso partnership
Now the team is preparing for a new chapter with Toro Rosso from next season and the Japanese is sure the upward trend will continue as they run a more organised development plan.
“We are confident we can confirm the reliability,” he claimed. “[This year] we needed to sacrifice time checking reliability to get the updates to the track. It was strategic.
“It’s very bad that we have had failures on the track and on the dyno,” Hasegawa added. “Reliability, we had a clear target, which is we have to be able to complete five races with one engine but we haven’t achieved that.”
