Both Red Bull and Toro Rosso have expressed satisfaction at the reliability of Honda’s power unit during pre-season testing.
The Japanese manufacturer is keeping up with Renault, the only other supplier of two Formula 1 teams, in terms of laps covered so far and in the speed trap, actually sat second behind Mercedes on Day 3 in Barcelona.
For Red Bull, who switched from Renault after 2018, and their driver Max Verstappen, the situation so far couldn’t be much better.
“I’m just very happy with the way we’re working together,” said the Dutchman. “It’s all very focused, and calm. Everybody knows their job. So that’s good.
“Talking about lap times is always difficult. For us what is important is to try to do a lot of laps and to do different set-ups on the car, to see which direction we have to go.”
On Wednesday, there was a rumour of vibrations coming from the Honda engine preventing both teams from running at higher revs which were then denied.
And while Verstappen admitted Red Bull certainly hasn’t turned up the power, he added: “I think nobody [has].
“What is most important is everything is reliable and the car is working well. We didn’t have a lot of issues and if you do more than 100 laps on a day it’s always positive.”
At the junior team, Daniil Kvyat would post the best time of the day, thanks to a late run on the C5 Pirelli tyre but he too focused more on the 137 laps he completed in the STR14.
“I don’t know what settings I was running, it is up to the engineers to analyse this kind of data, [but] it had all the reliability to do all those laps,” said the Russian.
“We did many laps today. That is what I am looking for. It is important and Honda is providing us with that opportunity.”
