Honda's head of R and D in their F1 project, Yusuke Hasegawa, has warned the Mclaren-Honda fans that the coming weekend in Bahrain will be a tough one for their two drivers, Fernando Alonso and Stoffel Vandoorne.
With the combination of the hot weather conditions predicted and the two long power straights, the Honda engine is not expected to perform as well as its rivals.
However, that said, he has more confidence in the progress of their power unit and the hope is that they can work hard on their reliability issues, find the perfect set up for the track conditions and score their maiden points of the season….
After a wet and cold weekend in China, we are now heading off to Bahrain where we expect the conditions to be the complete opposite, dry and hot,” he explained. “The race result in China was a big disappointment; despite the result, however, we took away a number of positives and, up until the retirements, we had an encouraging race in tricky conditions.”
“I have more confidence in the progress of our PU reliability after the first two grands prix of the season, and I am now looking forward to seeing our performance in Bahrain, where hopefully we can continue to build on our momentum at what is something of a home race for McLaren-Honda. The hot conditions and two long front and back straights of the track will be strenuous on the power units, so we are not expecting this weekend to be easy for us. We will concentrate to find the best set-up during practice together with McLaren, as well as working on ensuring our reliability. We hope to show fans a good race here and we'll make our best effort to collect some points.”
