Honda pledges power hike

Speaking of the scheduled engine development steps, Honda's Otmar Szafnauer said: "Our plan this year was to have fewer, but more significant updates. The first was planned for Imola and the second one here in Montreal. That's still the case - we've got more power and our engine is a bit more fuel-efficient here. The next update was planned for Hockenheim but we are not winning races, so we are trying to bring that forward by a race to Silverstone."

Takuma Sato explained earlier in the weekend that after his engine failure at Nurburgring, Honda had looked more strongly into reliability issues for a circuit as demanding on engines as Montreal.

Szafnauer elaborated: "This was always planned as a performance update and that's what it is. However, after the last race we have also made some changes to address our failure in Takuma's engine. So you could say it's both, but the performance enhancements that were planned all along are in this engine and they were tested at Silverstone and Monza."

Although most of the Honda reliability issues this year have afflicted Sato, Szafnauer denied that this was anything other than coincidence.

"It's the luck of draw," he said. "We've spent a lot of time looking at all the data and there's nothing to point at one driver versus the other. It's not driving style, it's just the circumstances of the race, and those are different."

Concerning Monaco, where Sato suffered his failure early in the race, just after a restart, Szafnauer said: "The restart definitely had something to do with it. We saw high temperatures on both our engines but had every expectation that both would finish that race. It was just unfortunate for Takuma that his didn't last. Nurburgring was a different issue and you can't correlate the two."