Pierre Gasly says there is “only good news” about the progress of Honda after his first test with Red Bull this week.
The Frenchman is one of the team’s best outlets for feedback having used the Japanese engine last year at Toro Rosso, where he scored two impressive top six finishes including fourth in Bahrain.
And though his first day in the RB15 ended in the gravel trap, a smoother second outing on Thursday still saw Gasly tally almost 240 laps in total with plenty of reason for optimism looking forward.
“So far it’s been really good, we haven’t pushed it flat out but already you can feel the performance has increased,” he said of the Honda engine to Motorsport.com.
“That’s the main thing and the reliability, we had no issue at all. Also, looking at Toro Rosso it looks really promising.
“Only good news from these four days. We need to keep working. The others are really fast, but at the moment we are testing a lot of things on our car.
“Now we need to understand what works best.”
Red Bull ended the week 0.7s off the best time set by Ferrari with both teams only using the C3 compound tyre and that is a strong platform to build from next week.
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Meanwhile, Honda technical director Toyoharu Tanabe also offered a positive evaluation of the first four days.
“It’s the first time in the hybrid era that we are powering two teams and at this test, we learned a lot in terms of how to operate with them both,” he noted.
“There were no major issues with the power units throughout this test. Toro Rosso has completed 482 laps over the four days and Red Bull did 475, meaning that Honda PUs ran a total of 957 laps.
“We will now spend the next few days analysing all the data we have acquired here, in order to move forward with development in the final four days of testing next week prior to the first race in Australia.”
