Honda to bring improved engine to Spa

Hot on the heels of their best finish so far this season, McLaren are looking for a jump in performance at the upcoming Belgian Grand Prix at Spa with an uprated Honda engine.

The team finished in a season best 5th thanks to Fernando Alonso in Hungary, with Jenson Button also inside the top ten on a track which doesn’t rely on top end power, instead highlighting a driveable car. Alonso has already said in the media that the car has had a good balance all season.

With an improved power plant for the rest of the season, McLaren can now look to closing the gap onto the top ten. It is all because Honda will be spending three of their tokens over the summer in order for the upgrade to be ready for Spa in two and a half weeks time. Without the upgrade McLaren would be looking very vulnerable at both there and Monza which are very engine dependant circuits.

Autosport magazine spoke to Honda, confirming the news.

“I am confident our reliability problems are now behind us which means we can turn our attention to increasing power,” confirmed Arai.

“After the summer shutdown our plan is to apply a new-spec engine using some of our remaining seven tokens.

“The most important area for us to concentrate on is the combustion.”

Honda boss Yasuhisa Arai also confirmed that coming into the sport was a lot harder than they expected with the new regulations, “The sport has changed immensely since the McLaren-Honda ‘glory days’, the current technology is much more sophisticated and it is tough to make a good racing car.

“We knew it wouldn’t be easy, but perhaps we didn’t imagine it would be this hard.”

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