Brawn confident Honda can still progress

Honda Racing team principal Ross Brawn is confident his team can still make progress up the grid this year, even though they have introduced the last of their major car upgrades

The RA108 has been fitted with new aerodynamic developments and a revised suspension in recent races, which appears to have helped lift the team back into the midfield group.

And although the new suspension is the last planned big new part planned for this year, Brawn thinks tweaking the system over the remainder of the year will still allow them to unlock more speed from their car.

"When you are looking at the improvements we are talking about with the suspension, they are difficult to quantify," aid Brawn. "If you get the dampers working a bit better you know it is better, but how much lap time or how much consistency does that really mean? It is difficult to quantify, so it will be interesting to see how it all works.

"This system has not been fully optimised because we haven't done enough rig testing on it. In the August break we have got some time on rigs to really scan it properly and tune it properly for Valencia."

Brawn has also revealed that the introduction of the new suspension of the car was not just about a performance boost - because it was also important for him to get confidence that the design structure he had put in place at the team was working.

"There were several reasons for the suspension," he said. "Some of it was for the reorganised group to take on a reasonable sized project before we got into the new car.

"We got some new management in the company and we also got a new CAD system, so it was good to have a sizeable project to tax the system, because we could not afford to discover operational issues."

And Brawn conceded that the final design of the new suspension was not perfect, because of the limitations given to them by the design of the RA108 and gearbox.

"It is still a fairly heavy compromise in terms of what we have had to achieve within the constraints of the gearbox," he said.

"If that suspension philosophy was designed from scratch it would not be as heavy as it has turned out to be, as we have had to compromise.

"It does not achieve as much as it potentially could have done, because unfortunately we were limited by the existing gearbox and other constraints. But it is a step in the right direction - although there is a limit to what we can do with this car unfortunately."