Honda are ‘changing way of development’

Honda chief Yusuke Hasegawa has revealed that the Japanese manufacturer have adopted a new approach in the development of their engines.

There have been very gradual signs of improvement at McLaren-Honda this season but the performance of their power unit is still a clear weak link.

With McLaren yet to decide whether to continue their partnership with Honda next year, Hasegawa believes the engine supplier are learning to adapt through this testing time.

"We are changing our way of development," Hasegawa told Autosport. "We're not too much insisting on mono-cylinder [dyno] development.

"We can check factors or elements or many concepts with the mono-cylinder [block] but we now understand we need to check with the V6 to finalise our specification.

"So we are no longer relying too much on the mono-cylinder results. As a reference, the mono cylinder test is important but to find the performance, we need to check the V6 results."

Reliability has been a major issue for Honda, with the MGU-H in particular causing plenty of problems.

However, Hasegawa reckons that issue is now looking like a thing of the past.

"The MGU-H failure took a very long time to solve," said Hasegawa. "We had many small issues in the engine – and that area is difficult to understand on the dyno.

"We are about to solve that [MGU-H] issue, we just need to confirm on the circuit.

"But the MGU-H specification we have introduced includes solutions for the problem so I believe it's OK."