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Old 30 Mar 2015, 14:32 (Ref:3521874)   #44
Richard C
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Originally Posted by Casper View Post
My point in all this just to clear things up is that every man and his dog is saying that Honda had a year to watch and learn when in reality they had no such thing. It didn't happen and couldn't happen.
Clear up? Didn't and couldn't? I think you are the only person I have seen (this forum or even the F1 press) who doesn't think Honda hasn't been watching and learning during 2014!!!

I don't want to downplay the effort to build a 2014+ spec F1 PSU. I think it was middle 2011 in which they were settling on V6 hybrid and clearly the engine manufactures likely had general ideas of what solutions would look like at that time. So that is a good 2+ years. But also remember that Honda announced their entry as a F1 PSU supplier in early 2013. So that is almost 2 years ago. So roughly the same amount of time, but with Honda offset by a year.

So lets say that Honda had mostly settled on an architecture in early 2014 (a year after announcing entry) and then we see the Mercedes dominance with a large amount of talk about the configuration of the Mercedes split turbo. I am sure that Honda was paying attention and thinking "should we do that?" If they felt it was an advantage, they could have made that adjustment. It might have been painful, but they could have done it if they wanted (and had the budget).

Yes, Honda would have been deeply invested in a design by early 2014 and it is hard to make changes late in the game, but it is not impossible. Just look at Porsche in WEC (which has a much more open engine spec than F1). They had some serious vibration issues with their V4 turbo very late in the design (to the point it was in the car and being tested) and did some relatively quick (weeks or months) rework to create new crank, cams, etc. And going into 2015, I believe they made a number of changes to what had been the 2014 engine. Granted they are not frozen like F1, but the point is there is time to make changes. And Honda was not operating under a freeze during the 2014 season.

Regarding Honda's partnership with McLaren and McLaren't previous experience with Mercedes. For the sake of argument, lets say Honda didn't have an opportunity to physically examine a Mercedes PSU, but there is absolutely no reason to believe they didn't extensively debrief those who did at McLaren. I am sure that NDA prevents a number of things from going straight to Honda, but McLaren can't forget things they learned along the way. They would have their own data and simulator work that would have defined things like operating range (torque curves), efficiency, cooling requirements, etc. The list goes on and on. All of this helpful to Honda.

So to say that Honda didn't or couldn't watch and learn is just crazy talk. They may have been hampered by budget (no money to do last minute rework), or have looked at other solutions and decided their own was still the best, or various other scenarios, but they absolutely were paying attention to what the competition was doing and adjusting when they were able and/or felt it was appropriate to do so.

Lastly it is clearly not all a perfect scenario for Honda. While they did get to observe and learn they were also a year behind experience wise. So while they were running engines on dynos, everyone else had engines in cars on track. Mercedes, Ferrari and Renault were fixing mechanical reliability issues (permissible even under the freeze) and adjusting software over the course of 2014 based upon race conditions. The details of those tweaks would probably always remain hidden for someone like McLaren given they had already announced their new Honda partnership. Another down side for Honda is that they had walked away from F1 engine design in 2008. So they have to have taken a hit by being out of the F1 engine game a bit even if the 2014+ spec was mostly new to everyone.

The bottom line is that this type of work does not happen in a vacuum! The only way this could work as you describe is if Honda was to be completely incompetent and ignored everything that was going on around them and I don't believe they did ignore or are incompetent. I do believe they could have been better prepared. I do mention budget above. The size of Honda's development budget would dictate how flexible (i.e. rework based upon what they see others doing successfully) they could be during the 2014 time frame. Time will tell if the 2015 Honda PSU is a diamond in the rough or a dog.

I think there might be some glimmers of hope. While both cars did retire this past weekend, given the problems in pre-season testing, I was expecting things to be even worse. On the McLaren side of things, I do believe they have issues with the car as well.

Richard
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