Why Honda progress isn't enough

The contrast between the start McLaren-Honda has made to the 2016 Formula 1 season and last year's woeful pre-season efforts at Jerez couldn't be starker.

Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button competed 12 laps between them on the opening two days of testing in 2015, lapping more than 18 seconds off the pace at best.

The Honda-powered MP4-30 was woefully unreliable and diabolically slow from the off, and though improvement came eventually, this set the tone for arguably the toughest season in McLaren's illustrious history.

Alonso managed 119 laps on day two of this week's opening Barcelona test of 2016, following Button's count of 84 amassed on Monday. That represents a 1592 per cent increase for McLaren-Honda in the space of 12 months!

The fact Alonso was not the slowest runner on the second day of this pre-season, and in fact was a much more respectable 3.272s adrift of Sebastian Vettel's benchmark (set on a tyre compound two steps softer) also represents real progress.

But Formula 1 is not simply about progress. It's a given that if you don't progress, you don't survive. What truly matters is the rate of progress you make compared to your rivals. Develop faster than them and you will succeed; develop too slowly and you will be left behind, even though you are objectively better than before.

McLaren joined forces with Honda to return to the status of a works team, without which it feels winning in F1 under the present rules is impossible, but it has been continually frustrated by the pace of Honda's re-adaptation to F1 and the speed of its reactions in recovering the ground lost to that poor start in 2015.

Remember too that Honda announced its return to F1 in 2013 and had a year of preparation away from the circuits before joining the party...

Eric Boullier and Yasuhisa Arai were all smiles when McLaren-Honda first appeared in public, in Abu Dhabi's 2014 post-season test © XPB

Honda has undoubtedly made progress following the travails of last year. It has worked to solve the severe ERS weaknesses that compromised its competitiveness, specifically by redesigning the compressor that was compromising the ability of its MGU-H and turbo assembly to recover heat energy from the combustion process.

Ferrari showed us last year what can be done in relatively short order, transforming what was comfortably the worst engine in 2014 into the second best last year.

It's early days, but Honda does not appear to have made progress to a similar order of magnitude. The ERS is certainly better, but overall performance is still some way from where it needs to be.

After the first morning of running on Monday, McLaren-Honda racing director Eric Boullier said he could only talk about how well the MP4-31 was working from a chassis perspective.

"As far as I'm concerned, I'm in charge of the chassis part, and drivers - on this part we are trying to be on target," he said. "As far as the engine part is concerned, you need to ask Honda.

"We will win when we have the best drivers, the best chassis, the best team, the best car, and the best engine."

After driving the new car for a whole day, Button declared that more work was required on the new power unit.

"[On] deployment we've made a good step forward, but with the power unit we've a lot of work still," he said. "They [Honda] have done a good job on reliability and pushing the deployment very hard over the winter, but I don't think any of us will be happy going to Melbourne with the power unit."

At the end of the second day of running, Alonso talked about how it was possible for McLaren to develop the best chassis after the early races of the new season, but did not say the same of the engine.

Button and Alonso became well versed in walking away from stricken McLarens © LAT

"The target is to have the best car," he said. "The best chassis is reachable, something very possible, maybe by the European races."

This all suggests McLaren's major players place a greater degree of confidence in the chassis potential than in that of the engine.

Honda has made important changes, but do they go far enough? Has it reacted quickly enough to the harsh lessons of last season in order to whip itself properly into shape for this coming campaign?

The jury is still out.

"Honestly, after just two days we don't have the expectations of where our standard is," says Honda's current F1 chief Yasuhisa Arai. "It's too early. After testing we will go to Australia and find out our standard.

"You know that last year was a very, very difficult season, especially the winter testing. Comparing to last year, it's much better.

"It's too early to totally confirm the dyno [numbers] in quite different conditions. We have to check carefully and confirm the dyno data with yesterday and today."

News that Arai will step down at the end of this month at first glance suggests there has at least been a seismic shift in Honda's approach to F1.

In appointing Yasuke Hasegawa to take over Arai's responsibilities for the F1 operation, Honda has promoted a guy with previous F1 experience, unlike Arai.

Hasegawa was a systems engineer at BAR-Honda and rose to become engineering director of the previous Honda F1 project, which ran until the end of 2008.

He will also take on a streamlined role, focusing purely on F1, with none of the extra responsibilities for Japanese domestic motorsport and managing Honda's Sakura R&D facility that Arai had to balance with his F1 duties.

Unlike Arai when he started leading Honda's project, Hasegawa has experience in F1 © LAT

The hope is that this will streamline communication and allow for faster reaction times, which should help address the some of the cultural and structural issues that McLaren feels have compromised the overall project's rate of development so far.

The fact Arai will step down is not really significant in itself. He is 59 years old and next year will reach the mandatory retirement age for Honda workers.

The structural change is far more important, whereby Hasegawa will focus solely on F1, under the supervision of Honda's new R&D president Yoshiyuki Matsumoto.

That's one person fully focused on F1 with another keeping an eye on things, instead of just one man dividing his time between three responsibilities. That can only accelerate the rate of development. Eventually.

But would Arai would have been kept on if he were younger, given Honda's struggles last year? He certainly feels that he has done his job in setting up Honda's current F1 project in the first instance, and he believes Hasegawa is the right person to take things to the next level.

"We did as much [as we could] quickly last year, but it was not enough," Arai says. "In Japanese corporate culture, you learn and you are groomed within the company, so they tend to move you around different departments without explanation. We don't really question it. That may be a big difference in culture [to Europe].

"The strengthening of Honda's F1 project in total is just more commitment from Honda. It's good timing. Hasegawa-san will take over my role and he will accelerate. I trust his acceleration. [He is] maybe more competitive and faster than me!"

Alonso and Button can feel that progress has been made, but want more © LAT

Regardless, these changes, though a welcome step in the right direction, could already have come too late to make a substantial difference to McLaren's chances of rising up the grid this season.

Arai has already settled the development direction for this year's engine, the basic specification of which will be frozen at the end of the month, so it will be difficult to make significant changes (in-season token development notwithstanding) if Honda has headed down the wrong path over the winter.

"Arai-san has already made the decision for this year of update plans for the engine," explains Hasegawa. "At this moment I just have to follow his plan.

"Maybe sooner or later I can put some of my ideas, but at this moment I have to follow through on his plan, for the next couple of months."

There is also the fact that Arai has helped choose his own successor, which may impact on the pace of progress. Hasegawa is described as a protege of Arai, having worked under him before Hasegawa's first adventure in F1 from 2002-08.

There will surely be a degree of deceleration during the transition period, and Hasegawa - seven years Arai's junior - could be overly influenced by the methods of his mentor, which have not proved to be an unqualified success.

However quickly Hasegawa is able to get up to speed in his new role, it seems Honda may well not be ready to translate its organisational change into real technical progress until the second half of this season at the earliest.

By that stage, rivals will be pressing ahead unabated and unencumbered by any bedding-in period for new leadership.

The burning question is how long can McLaren continue to wait for Honda to get properly on the pace, at all levels, before it really is too late.