Yusuke Hasegawa admitted it was another far from ideal day of pre-season testing on Friday for the McLaren-Honda Formula 1 Team, with more electrical issues forcing the team to investigate the problem throughout the day.
Fernando Alonso completed just 43 laps of the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya but stopped on track twice, just as team-mate Stoffel Vandoorne had done on Thursday, and Honda Executive Chief Engineer Hasegawa says it was a challenging day for everyone involved.
“The last day of testing became another tricky day for all of us in the team,” said Hasegawa. “It was unfortunate that we encountered the electrical issue again despite having replaced the parts under investigation overnight.
“This meant a significant amount of today’s test was spent trying to identify what was causing the car to lose power. The result was a challenging day that forced us to veer off our run plan, but we managed to recover somewhat in the afternoon and complete some valuable sections of our test programme.”
Hasegawa admits the whole eight days of pre-season testing have been far from easy for the McLaren-Honda partnership, but despite this he praised the mechanics and engineers for all the hard work they’ve done to try and solve the problems that they have faced.
“The winter test as a whole has been tough for us, however, it’s also true that the team has worked incredibly hard to make progress and I’m very thankful to each and every one of them,” said Hasegawa. “They have done McLaren-Honda proud.
“We still have some more time before Melbourne and we’ll continue to work tirelessly with McLaren right up until we board the plane for Australia.”
