Honda credits Red Bull Racing and AlphaTauri for their ‘excellent relationship’ for improved results in F1 so far.
Ever since the beginning of their partnership with AlphaTauri, at the start of the 2018 F1 season, the power unit of Honda have progressed at a rather impressive rate from where they stood previously with McLaren.
The Japanese manufacturer worked with the British team from 2014 to 2017, and in this time period they struggled with both reliability and power. However, once with AlphaTauri, and then Red Bull as well in 2019, Honda made apparent gains on both of those fronts.
And looking at what was behind this seemingly-sudden progression, Honda F1’s technical director Toyoharu Tanabe pointed to their new relationship which breeds better results. “Those results came thanks to improvements on the chassis, aero and PU side.
“But it also owed a lot to the excellent working relationship, when every problem was an opportunity to learn and every success was shared between us. Supplying two teams last year, with both of them part of the same family, linked by Red Bull Technology, allowed us to up the speed of our development and that is something that will carry over into this season.
“Everyone at our facilities in Sakura, Japan and Milton Keynes, UK has been working very hard to get even more power out of our PU. Of course, power is nothing without reliability and this year, that is even more challenging as the calendar will be the longest ever in F1, with 22 races.”
In addition to this, Tanabe discussed how he thinks 2020 F1 season will play out for the teams for which he provides engines. “The technical regulations relating to the PU have hardly changed since last year,” he said.
“Therefore, we have been able to make progress based on the experience we gained across all four of our cars in 2019. I believe we can make a step forward and our aim is to obtain even better results than we did last year.”
“In any sport, your performance can only be judged in relation to that of your competitors, so until we start racing, it’s impossible to predict just how successful we can be.” Honda has had a good start in F1 pre-season testing so far.
Here’s Red Bull on getting through 2020 on three Honda units
Here’s the details from first F1 test
The story was edited by Darshan Chokhani
