Under the skin of Honda’s latest F1 saga

Yusuke Hasegawa is a man under real pressure. It shows. He looks tired and stressed as he walks into Honda's hospitality unit in Melbourne. "Are you OK?" Autosport asks as we sit down to talk. He lets out a long sigh. "I'm OK..."

But all is not OK in Honda's world. It's not an overstatement to say that this new Formula 1 season has started disastrously for Honda and its partner McLaren.

This is meant to be the season this famous F1 alliance starts making real waves again, following two years of struggle. After an encouraging display last year, when Honda developed its V6 hybrid turbo engine effectively enough to help McLaren vault from ninth to sixth in the constructors' championship, there was genuine hope and expectation of joining the fight with F1's 'big three' this season.

Honda used the abolition of the FIA's engine development restrictions to completely overhaul its power unit design for 2017 - repackaging the turbine and compressor to follow Mercedes' lead, lowering the centre of gravity and reducing weight to aid the handling of McLaren's new chassis, and developing new lean combustion technology in a bid to improve efficiency and extract more power.

Honda wasn't promising the earth, but during the official pre-season launch at McLaren's Technology Centre in Woking, Hasegawa declared that by the time the teams convened for the first race of 2017 in Australia, Honda would at least bridge the estimated 80bhp deficit to Mercedes it faced at the end of '16's development race.

But those hopes were shattered by a troubled pre-season test programme at Barcelona. Honda suffered an engine failure during the team's pre-test filming day in Spain, and a problem traced to the design of the oil tank spoiled Fernando Alonso's first proper day in the car.

These unfortunate issues did not turn out to be a blip. McLaren-Honda completed the fewest laps of all 10 teams during eight full days of testing. The car could barely manage 10 laps at a time before breaking down, and it was also slow - tyre-corrected, around three seconds off the pace set by Ferrari.

The new combustion engine proved unstable and lacking driveability. Short-shifting to improve traction caused detonation at low revs; engine behaviour within the optimum rev range was so wild that the drivers had to over-rev the engine to tame it. But that meant less power. What's more, huge vibrations through the drivetrain caused the car to shake itself to bits, leading to persistent electrical failures.

McLaren tempers flared. Alonso tore into Honda publicly, declaring the team had "only one problem: that is the power unit. There is no reliability and there is no power. We are 30km/h down on the straight, every straight."

The team's racing director Eric Boullier said relations with Honda had become strained to the "maximum". McLaren began working out whether it could somehow divorce Honda and get back into bed with the Mercedes customer engine programme.

All this before the cars had even started the first race of the new season. Honda and its F1 chief are under more pressure than ever. This must be so tough to take, given how high expectations were raised by last year's modest success.

"[It is] very hard, very hard," Hasegawa tells Autosport. "It's difficult to express how hard. I'm hugely disappointed. Of course we noticed most of the failures came from our PU. It's fair to say not everything came from our PU. [But] from the performance point of view, the biggest weakness is our PU. We are very disappointed."

The warning signs were there for Honda as far back as December. Development of its new advanced combustion technology had progressed well on the dyno, but Hasegawa says problems began to manifest when Honda tried to transfer the technology from one cylinder to six.

"As a matter of fact we were thinking [it was] too easy, [but] it was too difficult to achieve the new technology," Hasegawa admits. "We had some laboratory level experiments. We were thinking [it was] too easy, so that was my mistake.

"We have to realise the whole package, but we didn't make it. We made some good progress in the mono-cylinder on the dyno, but as soon as we completed the V6 engine we had many issues.

"What we achieved in [the] mono-cylinder is at a very good level, but when we transfer exactly the same specification to the V6 engine it doesn't work. We are very disappointed. But it was too late that we noticed that - at Christmas.

"After we understand the issues this was the time we needed to confirm the final specification. We needed to have some compromise."

Things only got worse when the new V6 was installed into the McLaren MCL32 and run on track, where those vibrations manifested themselves for the first time.

Driving around this problem is further restricting McLaren-Honda's performance. In Melbourne, you could hear the gears grinding as Alonso and Stoffel Vandoorne shifted up much later than they would have ideally wanted to.

"We have to avoid that area - we have huge vibrations," Hasegawa explains. "The only thing I can tell is that on the dyno we didn't have such a big issue. When we have a gearbox, driveshaft and tyre, it has some resonance. Please understand I'm not blaming the chassis, we have to realise the situation on the dyno as well."

The engine's combustion model is not only unstable, the engine architecture itself also appears too weak to sustain the extra loads being put through it by the increased g-loadings coming from the enhanced aerodynamics and wider tyres on this year's McLaren. Honda is now working furiously on an update package to try to correct the problems.

"From January we were trying to do some analytic job on what the difference was in mono-cylinder to V6 engine," says Hasegawa, who reckons the fifth race of the season in Barcelona will be the "latest" point at which Honda introduces an updated specification. "So something like the stiffness of the engine itself, the airflow difference, and the biggest one is the influence of each cylinder on the other.

"If you put [too] much fuel into the number-three cylinder you lose something from elsewhere. Theoretically, the exhaust pressure wave has more influence in a four-cylinder engine, but in a three-cylinder engine it doesn't - technically speaking. We didn't think there would be a big effect from mono-cylinder to V6, but as a matter of fact it affects very much.

"I try to react to the team's and drivers' depression, if we have a way, but it is not an easy job. It's a big job to update the engines, so we need to live with the situation for a couple of weeks. Obviously if we find the way, as soon as we get it things will be alright.

"We are trying even harder in Sakura. We are trying everything we can do now."

McLaren-Honda will simply have to make do in the meantime. Some Honda 'countermeasures' for the pre-season problems at least allowed the team to finish the first race in Australia, and a heroic performance from Alonso actually came within a few laps of netting McLaren-Honda an unlikely point.

That looks a less-than-disastrous holding pattern for now, but there is genuine fear that the more conventional circuits in the early part of the campaign - China, Bahrain, Russia, which all contain long straights - will brutally expose Honda's power deficit.

Hasegawa admits Honda has missed its power target, saying the new engine has "almost the same power" as last year's engine, which of course means it has gone backwards from its 2016 position of being 80bhp away from Mercedes, which in turn has found even more performance over the winter.

The way Alonso had to save fuel in what he called a "brutal way", and was then obliterated by Esteban Ocon's Force India and Nico Hulkenberg's Renault during their late wheel-to-wheel battle for 10th at Melbourne - even on Albert Park's relatively short main straight - suggests the engine is too thirsty, and that old problems with recovered energy deployment may have crept back in.

It's a mess, and the only way Honda can dig itself out is by correcting this combustion problem.

"The engine has the potential, but we can't use it because of the knocking, and we can't use it without exceeding the durability limit," Hasegawa says. "For the maximum performance from this engine, maybe in a couple of weeks we will find some solution.

"We have already achieved some good level of performance with the mono-cylinder engine. The thing we have to do is transfer that technology to the V6. We have already seen good numbers in the mono-cylinder. Although we still have to improve that, we have some confidence we can achieve that level.

"We can change the intake system or exhaust system; we can see a solution with that, but we can't change [completely] the inside of the engine. Obviously we have no time to change completely the packaging, and I don't think it's necessary to change everything.

"If we find a good solution we need to change the engine for round five or six, so I really want to update our specification before then, or to that time."

It's difficult not to feel sorry for Honda. It arrived in V6-era F1 underprepared and at least a year too early, and joined the party much later than the other manufacturers, without a pre-existing F1 infrastructure. It is well behind the curve, so has to work extra hard to try to catch a target that is forever moving further away as its rivals also improve.

"We started two years after the other manufacturers, so the ratio of the development speed is fair enough, but to catch them we need to develop twice as fast as everyone else," explains Hasegawa, who feels setbacks are "inevitable" in this situation.

"Our development is not very slow compared to the other teams, but if you ask if we are two times faster than them, the answer is no.

"When you try new technology you need to take some risks. The first digital camera compared to an analogue camera, the digital camera's performance was much lower [initially] than the analogue camera..."

McLaren has suggested Honda simply isn't quick enough for this game, that it doesn't fully understand the rate of development needed to be successful in F1. In other words, that Honda is too 'analogue'.

Hasegawa refutes this - Honda has a long history in F1 after all - but he concedes that the relentless demands of modern F1 do jar with the culture of a mass-market automotive manufacturer.

"I have many objections, but we didn't [do] a good job, so I cannot make an excuse about this," says Hasegawa to suggestions that Honda is out of step with what Boullier calls the "F1 culture".

"We have much less works teams now. When I was in BAR-Honda we had Toyota, BMW, Cosworth, many engine manufacturers. Now we only have four, which is a big difference, so the current engine power difference is a big effect to us. If we lose to Mercedes we are behind three teams, so it is a huge effect.

"This is a unique competition. We achieved almost the same level of performance and power, with a much lower and lighter engine. We can be proud if it is a mass-production engine - if this year's new Civic has a much lighter engine with the same power - but in this competition we cannot be proud.

"It's fair to say our engine is more than 10kg lighter and the CofG is a centimetre lower - it is incredible in Formula 1. I want to be proud about that, but I cannot. From that point of view we didn't step back, but everybody sees it as a step back."

This McLaren-Honda crisis has obvious parallels with the tense scenario that unfolded between Red Bull and Renault in 2015. Renault over-reached after recovering from its own disastrous start under these regulations in '14, Red Bull lost patience and went after a Mercedes customer engine supply, and Renault eventually restructured its engine programme, accelerated development, and helped get Red Bull back to winning ways last year.

Perhaps Honda needs a Renault-style shake-up - for someone like Mario Illien to come in and do some dual development work to accelerate the learning curve.

Hasegawa says this kind of work is already underway. McLaren helped Honda recruit engine experts with knowledge of the rival F1 engine programmes, and although there are questions concerning how much impact they can have, and are allowed to have (Gilles Simon made little impact during his time at Honda), Hasegawa says they are integrated and working well.

"We are doing many programmes at the same time," he says. "Also, we are utilising some outside consultants as well. They [the McLaren recruits] are working like Honda members. We are completely united. Inside Honda as well we have many English and French engineers. We still have some barriers, around language and culture, but I think we [have] a very good combination.

"For the instantaneous result, they [the recruits] are very helpful. Not only with their talent, they can also bring some information from the outside, which is very good. [But] everything is an excuse, because from the outside we didn't do a very good job. It is a big issue. We have to show our development."

The next stage will probably be to open the programme up to customers. Sauber has already held talks, and Honda is open about the fact that it would benefit from having more cars running its engine and thus more valuable data to draw upon.

But that won't solve Honda's immediate problem, which is to transform its recalcitrant new engine into one powerful, efficient and reliable enough to vault McLaren into the top four as soon as possible.

McLaren has clearly lost patience with the project, and Honda is fast running out of second chances. Everything is in danger of unraveling.

The fate of McLaren-Honda rests in Hasegawa's hands. If he cannot find answers quickly, the whole thing is surely doomed. He is a man under serious pressure. The entire weight of expectation to avert this crisis rests on his shoulders. No wonder he is feeling the strain.