Honda has set a rather conservative goal of achieving their first win with Red Bull before the summer break.
The Japanese manufacturer made a strong start to their new partnership with the Anglo-Austrian outfit, as Max Verstappen secured Honda’s first podium in almost a decade with P3 in Australia.
And now the company’s F1 chief Masashi Yamamoto hopes to build on that platform going forward.
“This is a very important year for us because we’ve started with two teams for the first time in the hybrid era,” he told Motorsport.com.
“Now we have a situation that we can try to express how Honda tries to win and we hope to make it come true, maybe by around the summer.
“We have now a chance to show our philosophy towards winning.”
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That certainly should be possible with races like Monaco coming up, but Yamamoto explained the reason for his steady approach.
“We’re not trying to make the expectation low, but racing is the result, what matters is the result. We can see everything in the result,” he claimed.
“We have to pile up the technology and performance towards the race and our honest feeling is that we haven’t reached the level of Ferrari and Mercedes as a PU. We have to go beyond [the current level].”
That is not stopping Mercedes motorsport boss Toto Wolff from highlighting the performance of the Honda unit.
“We saw how they’ve eaten up Sebastian into Turn 3,” the Austrian said, referring to Verstappen streaking ahead of the Ferrari on the DRS straight in Australia.
“Power was enormous, and seeing them come back strong makes me happy because it’s a good group of people and they’re really decent men.
“The combination with Red Bull will certainly become a threat. The level of performance is such that you must certainly have them in the calculation for the championship.”