Honda plan early shift of focus

Team principal Ross Brawn has spoken several times about the difficulties of balancing development on their RA108 against the preparations they must make for the radical rules due to be introduced next season.

And on the back of a fairly encouraging start to the season, Brawn has now confirmed that after the updates planned for the Spanish Grand Prix there will be just one more upgrade package to follow.

When asked by autosport.com about the update schedule and specifically how big a step he was expecting from the Barcelona package, Brawn said: "It is not the magnitude of what we did between the launch and Melbourne, but it is somewhere in-between and it is quite a good step.

"It is fairly traditional for all the teams to make a step for the first European race, so we have got to take that into consideration. But I am very pleased with the way that things are developing in that area.

"The plan is probably to do one more update for the middle of the season, and then I think we will be focusing that resource totally on 2009.

"The 2009 programme has started already but as each month goes by, we move more and more resource onto it. And the mid-season update, I guess the aero work will finish late May, early June, and then the focus will be on next year."

Brawn claims that the progress the team have made so far this year has been more down to better working practices that out-and-out improvements made to the car.

"There were a few small things on the car in Bahrain, but we are setting the car up a little better and the drivers understand it a little bit more," he said.

"I think the team are getting a little more confident and working nicely. We are still hanging on by our finger nails, but it is nice to have been in Q3 - as it's something I hadn't thought about before!

"It is something you tend to take for granted at one end of the grid, which suddenly becomes a reward in itself if you can achieve it from where we have come from."

And although an early shift of focus to the 2009 programme could give Honda an advantage over their rivals, Brawn has played down any talks that the team could be battling for the championship as soon as next year.

"I don't think so, to be frank," he said. "There are a lot of things that the top teams are doing because they have the structure to do those things. They have the structure to understand what needs to be done.

"When you take a new set of regulations and a new challenge, you have all the tools in place to understand what you need to do and what you need to create.

"We have got completely different tyres next year, and we have got an excellent tyre group - but how well we will be able to predict what sort of car we need for the tyres is a difficult challenge. And the top teams are top teams for a reason. So there are things like that we have to take into account."