Honda believed to have spent development tokens on reliability and engine efficiency
Friday 5 June 2015 11:36, UK
McLaren have played down the impact Honda’s engine-token spend is likely to make this weekend in Montreal with the team expected to deliver a bigger performance gain in Austria.
It was revealed earlier this week that Honda, McLaren’s engine suppliers, had elected to use up two of their remaining nine development ‘tokens’ for the Canadian GP, an event which places particular emphasis on engine power.
However, it is thought that the tokens have been deployed with reliability rather than outright performance in mind, with the team targeting the Austrian GP at the end of the month as their next breakthrough event after scoring their first points of the year in Monaco - a track with a drastically different character to the wide-open straights of the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve.
“It will be tricky,” Jenson Button told Sky Sports News HQ. “Monaco is a unique circuit, but we are pretty good in low-speed corners which is a positive for here - although there are a lot of long-straights in between them.
“We know there are a few areas we need to improve in: one is high speed corners and the other is outright power.”
After missing the first year of F1’s new turbo era, the Honda engine, although improving, is still believed to be substantially weaker than those of Mercedes and Ferrari, leaving Button to pin his hopes this weekend on the annual vagaries of Montreal – a circuit where he won in 2011 despite at one stage running at the back of the field.
“We are not sure how it will go this weekend, but this one of those races where anything can happen," he said. "I started the penultimate lap in eighth last year and finished fourth – I overtook two cars and two cars crashed so anything can happen here and we just have to be ready to pounce when it does.”
Meanwhile, Button’s McLaren team-mate Fernando Alonso has wryly suggested that Mercedes may ultimately review their Monaco mistake as a "funny thing" by the end of the season.
"I watched the race afterwards and [it was] probably a miscommunication, a miscalculation,” the Spaniard told Sky Sports News HQ. “A very short time to decide and make a decision - and maybe between him and the team they collapsed a little bit.
"But they have a big margin in the championship, in performance, in everything so this will not influence anything on the championship. They will win and this will be just a funny thing to remember."
Mercedes currently lead the Constructors’ Championship by almost one hundred points from Ferrari – with McLaren a mere 238 points behind the Silver Arrows.
