Honda‘s Head of F1 Project, Yusuke Hasegawa, felt the MCL32 package performed strongly at the 2017 Brazilian Grand Prix on Sunday, showing good pace throughout the weekend.
It was an excellent race for McLaren Honda Formula 1 Team driver Fernando Alonso, who was able to manage his tyres perfectly to bring home a strong result and four more points for the Woking based squad, and Hasegawa believes his performance showed the solid progress that has been made recently.
“It was a good race for us today, with Fernando having some exciting on-track battles against his rivals.
“Fernando, who started the race from P6, managed his tyres well, even in the high temperatures, and maintained a consistent pace throughout the afternoon.
“Although it was disappointing that he was unable to overtake Massa and move further up the field, it was a great performance and he collected more points for the team.
“On the flip side, Stoffel had a very disappointing race and was unable to make it to the end of lap one, through no fault of his own. Up until then, he’d had a solid weekend.
“Overall, it was an okay weekend for us, with our package showing decent speed during each session and two more points collected as a reward for everyone’s hard work.”
With just one round of the 2017 Formula 1 Championship now remaining, the end of the McLaren Honda partnership, that promised so much potential but was sadly unable to deliver, is nigh.
Despite their many troubles along the way, Honda’s chief engineer is hoping they can end their collaboration with McLaren on a high, by achieving their best performance of the year at the season finale in Abu Dhabi, in just under two weeks’ time.
“We have only one more race to go for this season as McLaren Honda, so we’ll try our maximum to extract all the potential from our package.”
