Fry: Honda now on a par with front runners

The Brackley-based team had struggled in recent years to maintain competitiveness in mid-season, normally looking strong in winter testing but then falling behind the leaders halfway through the year.

And Fry says this was all because the team was under-resourced prior to Honda's takeover last year.

"Fundamentally, we didn't have the resources to do the job," Fry said at the launch of the RA107 at Barcelona.

"The team have always been well-funded, but it's not until we had full Honda backing that we've had some of the things a team need in order to be at the front of the grid.

"Obviously you know about our new wind tunnel, which came into use at the middle of last year. That was instrumental in the improvement in the second half of the year.

"We also invested very heavily in additional machining facilities and all sort of things that our competitors had and that we didn't, and now we've got them.

"We played a big game of catch-up, and the result of that was once we had the resources to, say, make good starts [to the season], we never had the resources, the energy, the people, to sustain that through the year, and we have that now.

"We have now four times the number of aerodynamicists that we had 12 months ago, as an example, which brings us not ahead of the other large teams, but it brings us to at least on par.

"It's the first time we are starting to work on a level field with the other teams. We now have a similar number of people as McLaren, Renault and maybe Ferrari, I don't know.

"I think with that level of resources, with that level of backing from Honda, you do have the ability to maintain the pace of development right through the year. And up until now we had not been able to do that."