Red Bull Racing’s Max Verstappen and Toro Rosso’s Pierre Gasly will use the Spec 4 Honda power unit in F1 Italian GP.
After Honda brought the Spec 4 unit in F1 Belgian GP at Spa-Francorchamps for Red Bull’s Alexander Albon and Toro Rosso’s Daniil Kvyat, the Japanese manufacturer will bring it for Verstappen and Gasly in Italian GP at Monza.
Both the drivers will, therefore, get grid penalty this weekend but Honda gets an extra unit for the rest of the 2019 F1 season. It remains to be seen if they will use a fifth element to further boost its chances for 2020.
“We now go from one classic track to another, from Spa to Monza for the Italian GP, which is the last race in Europe this year,” said Honda’s Toyoharu Tanabe. It is one of the highlights of the season and also the home race for one of our teams, Scuderia Toro Rosso.
“From a PU point of view, the main development is that we plan to run the Spec 4 PU with all four drivers for the first time, after just Albon and Kvyat ran it in Belgium. For their first race with Spec 4, Gasly and Verstappen will therefore take grid penalties and start from the back of grid, but we believe they can still race strongly on Sunday.
“We gathered useful data in Spa, which we have used to make changes to PU settings and calibration in preparation for this race. We will try to maximize the potential of Spec 4 and hope to get another positive result, maintaining the momentum we gained in Spa.”
Speaking about the upgrade during Belgian GP, Tanabe stated: “We bring performance improvement with the Spec 4 PU. The purpose of the spec-4 is a performance gain.
“Because as always, as I’ve mentioned, we’re still catching up pace to make the gap between the top runners and then our teams. Honda should improve PU performance.”
