Honda to give McLaren upgraded F1 engine for Monaco or Canada

With drivers required to use only five engines per season, units will run between four and five races before being changed - and Honda intends to take advantage of scheduled changes for the McLaren drivers to offer upgrades.

Fernando Alonso moved onto his second internal combustion engine in Bahrain after his heavy crash in Australia and the current unit has now done four grands prix.

Jenson Button took his second in China, after a failure in Bahrain, and has completed three races with it.

Honda has been working on development and has some updates ready to go so the decision to introduce some of them at one of the next two races ties in with the current engines coming to the end of their cycle.

"We keep developing," Hasegawa told Autosport. "It's possible to introduce some of the updates even next week.

"But I don't want to waste tokens for a small update so we need to decide when.

"In Monaco or Canada, we will introduce a new engine [as part of the cycle] so with that timing, we have to introduce something but we haven't decided what just yet."

Hasegawa said while Honda has yet to use any of its remaining 14 tokens this season, there have still been gains.

"Although we are using the same spec from round one to here, all the races we are squeezing power from the same engine by trying different settings," he said.

"From Sochi and in Spain, we are trying to introduce most full power settings during the race.

"Normally, we try to use that power just for qualifying but because we need more power, we have introduced modes for the race and it was fine.

"It was very encouraging."