Has Honda finally woken from its F1 nightmare?

At ten past nine on Monday morning, Honda issued an emphatic statement of intent. Brendon Hartley headed to the end of the pitlane and the Toro Rosso-Honda became the first car to take to the track in 2018 pre-season Formula 1 testing.

There was no smoke, no failure, no embarrassment; the car simply worked as intended, and by the end of the day Hartley had notched up 93 laps. That's only 16 laps short of the combined total Honda has managed if you add up its total for each first day of testing from 2015-17. And since then, things have appeared to run smoothly for an alliance that has started promisingly.

"The perception is right," says Toro Rosso technical director James Key. "Going out first wasn't my idea because there are so many opportunities to mess that up and look a bit foolish rather than clever! But the fact we did get out first was positive, although I think the statement of intent will come out in the wash.

"The [real] intention is to have a competitive and reliable power unit and chassis - that's what matters at the end of the day. It's a building year and we were quite late with the engine. We've had worse, but it's later than we would like. There's still some stuff to do on the chassis side and the engine as well, but our priorities have been to get the fundamentals right. If you do that, then you're free to develop.

"So far, the perception is correct, there's been no major issue at all. The first really good indicator of that was the filming day. Last year, we did five laps and an engine change, this year we did 23, so just below the 100km limit, and finished at lunchtime. That was 'wow'."

Toro Rosso-Honda ended the test 2.801 seconds off the pace, which is fine. Nothing extraordinary, but the car is consistently moving and lapping adequately, if no more. More importantly, it completed the largest number of laps across the week with 324. Just given the low expectations, that's a great start.

But a note of caution must be sounded. This doesn't mean Toro Rosso is going to be up at the front taking on the other works teams, and it's a sign of how far Honda has to progress that simply being able to run reliability almost feels like a miraculous step. But as far as an exercise in, as Key puts it, getting the fundamentals right, it's a very tidy start. And while the temperatures at Barcelona made it difficult to evaluate the real-world cooling performance, the first test went well.

When it comes to communication, there are some very real hurdles to overcome - Not least the 6000 miles between Toro Rosso's Faenza base and Honda's Tochigi facility in Japan

This is the honeymoon phase for Toro Rosso and Honda. The team is in its first manufacturer relationship and relishing the attention of a mighty automotive giant, while the engine supplier is effectively on the rebound from a McLaren marriage that fell apart very publicly. So, of course all is going to seem to be sweetness and light. But there's reason for what might best be termed cautious optimism.

Right now, in the early days of this partnership, on-track performance is neither the most important factor nor especially impressive. What matters is that there is clear evidence of the collaboration between team and manufacturer being much improved.

"The communication is smoother on the development side and also the management side," says Honda motorsport chief Masashi Yamamoto. "Myself and [team principal Franz] Tost and the development side have good communication together."

That's easy to say, so let's dig a little deeper into what that actually means in terms of the way Toro Rosso and Honda work together, and what impact that's had on the car. Firstly, when it comes to communication, there are some very real hurdles to overcome. Not least among these are the 6000-odd miles separating Toro Rosso's Faenza base and Honda's Tochigi facility in Japan.

Key recently completed what he described as a 'day trip' to Japan for meetings, while Autosport's technical expert Gary Anderson recalls having to make four such trips early in the 1998 season when his Jordan team was powered by Mugen-Honda engines. As an aside, Key recalls having to compile some data sets for Anderson to take with him on those trips while working at Jordan!

"It's much more down to Honda's guys' abilities in English than it is in ours' in Japanese, as they make a great effort to speak good English," says Key. "We've had our cultural training in Japanese culture to understand a little more about how their companies are structured, how they communicate and what certain things really mean, so that's helped us a lot too.

"There's definitely ways of running meetings and things which are different, and that's all gone OK so far. What's a challenge for us is we're spread over two countries anyway [Toro Rosso has an aerodynamic base in Bicester in the UK] so we've already got a compromise on how we operate.

"Everyone is mostly in Italy, so you've got Italian guys speaking a second language to Japanese guys speaking a second language, with a massive time difference and two different cultures, and the number of pitfalls in that are huge. But everyone's making the effort to make sure that it works."

McLaren unquestionably had some communication problems with Honda, and it's probably no surprise that Toro Rosso has been at pains to ensure this is an area of strength. Of course, McLaren is also a traditional top team with a history of winning championships, and perhaps more confident in the demands it issues its engine partner, but that's a hand it might have overplayed. The flip side of the coin is that Toro Rosso is new to this kind of dynamic, and might yet go too far the other way. Naturally, Key is hopeful that won't be the case.

"From a working relationship point of view, we agreed very early on and we were all absolutely in agreement that it's a single effort between us and we need to produce the fastest overall package," says Key. "If there's a compromise required one way or the other we would look at it in a very scientific way, try to find the best solutions and minimise the compromise.

"If we've got a particular aero issue we want to address and there's a bit of engine in the way of that and there's more development [potential] from that on the chassis side, or if there's a particular engine thing they are keen to see through and it's a slight compromise for the chassis, we will see it through.

"It's on a case-by-case basis. It does require a lot of co-ordination, but it's not an issue because it's for good reason."

For evidence of this, it's understood that Honda was allowed to elongate the V6 engine by a couple of centimetres to improve performance and reliability, which Toro Rosso was happy to accommodate.

"It's probably a lot less than people suggested last year. We were hearing massive numbers like 11%! It's actually not so far off what we've been used to, and in some respects better" James Key on Honda's performance deficit

Toro Rosso is also benefiting from the pain McLaren went through with Honda. This is an evolution of the 2017 power unit, which plays a big part in the reliable running. Remember that pre-season '16 didn't go too badly prior to the big changes ahead of last year, so this can't be interpreted as reflecting a complete change of Honda's F1 trajectory. But there is confidence that the concept is right and it will just take time to develop.

Of course, whether Honda's progression is quick enough for F1's demands is another matter. The fact this is very much a Honda project and part of its wider empire has caused some problems, and if it's not willing or able to work to the development pace required, or able to improve its simulation tools to validate the direction being taken in Japan, problems will arise again. The correlation between real world and bench/simulation performance has been a weakness in recent years.

One thing that has changed is Honda's F1 leadership. Out has gone Yusuke Hasegawa, with Toyoharu Tanabe coming in as F1 technical director. He's going to be focused on the racing and testing activities trackside, and he's a Honda lifer who has been with the company since 1984, but who has previously worked as an engineer for Gerhard Berger at McLaren and later as chief engineer for Jenson Button at BAR and Honda in the last decade.

So he's someone who should be well-placed to balance up Honda's corporate culture, which has occasionally been at odds with the pace of development required for F1, and the demands of getting results in grand prix racing.

There's plenty of caveats that must be appended to the feelgood story of Toro Rosso-Honda starting in such a 'normal' fashion. And one key question is the overall performance level. There's no doubt the Honda engine is still behind the Renault package Toro Rosso used last year, the question is by how much.

Again, there's confidence that during the course of the season Honda could overhaul Renault. But it's fair to say Honda has not struggled to project tremendous confidence and optimism in recent years, so we have to take that with a pinch of salt until we see the progression with our own stopwatches.

Key declines to put a number on the laptime loss Toro Rosso has suffered from swapping to Honda, but he does dismiss the idea it's as far behind as some suggest. Significantly, he cites the performance analysis work Toro Rosso conducted before the Honda deal as suggesting the package was never quite as hopeless as made out.

"Probably a lot less than people were suggesting last year," he says of the Honda deficit. "It's always difficult to tell from the outside, but our analysis suggested it wasn't quite as far off as maybe was being suggested - we were hearing massive numbers like 11%! It's actually not so far off what we've been used to, and in some respects better."

There was an amusing snapshot during Monday's running, when Fernando Alonso's McLaren-Renault found itself stuck behind Hartley's STR-Honda. After three years complaining of straightline speed, Alonso only eventually got past by cutting the chicane (which led to his fastest time of the day subsequently being deleted).

To read into that kind of battle is over the top, but it was an amusing vignette that underlines that McLaren was certainly motivated to paint struggling Honda in the worst possible light last year. What Toro Rosso hasn't had to do was compromise the drag levels of its car concept (which, remember, were originally set on the basis of using Renault propulsion) to adapt.

"It has not been a development consideration to try and compensate for everything, we've just got on with where we think we need to be," says Key. "Because we'd done our analysis and were able to get data early, we knew it looked alright. In the past we have had to do this, but there's been no necessity to."

So what does all of this mean for Toro Rosso-Honda in 2018? Nothing more than things have started sensibly, that the power unit package is reliable - and not as far off as some feared - and that the working relationship between the two sides of this alliance is strong, but as yet untested in the heat of battle.

The key question is how Honda progresses from this foundation, and how quickly? And there's more at stake than just how good the results are this year, because Toro Rosso's big brother team Red Bull is looking very closely at the possibility of taking Honda engines for 2019. And the key factor in that happening will be Honda making good, consistent progress and, crucially, delivering what it says it will deliver.

Right now, the Renault is unquestionably the stronger package. But while Honda has a lot of lost credibility to rebuild after three seasons with McLaren that went very badly, let's say it has at least steadied the ship and earned a chance to show the lessons of 2015-17 have been learned, and that what Key calls its 'firepower' can be turned into tangible gains.