Secondly, the 1MJ from mgu-k and 3.5MJ from the H was from Spa, not Monza.
There is nothing suggesting they had a surplus at Hungary, it's track spent at lower speed with shorter straights and far less time on throttle. If you can only harvest 2MJ per lap then at a track which requires less power it won't be as much of an issue, at a track that requires more power it will be a bigger issue. Suggesting power harvesting is fine because it's only worked effectively at one of the few tracks it matters less is illogical thinking. If the ONLY tracks with which the Honda engine seems to harvest enough energy is a track that requires much less than others, it much more strongly suggests they don't harvest enough but they were significantly less badly effected there. If they did harvest enough why were they suddenly terrible at Spa and Monza... in fact, they were terrible at Hungary, their pace was awful. If 438 crashes, penalties and failures hadn't effected the 10 cars ahead of them and several behind them they weren't remotely close to the pace required to get into the top 10 let alone 5th.
Arai(as he has all year) was using the result to deflect from realities. They got 5th out of luck, had they finished the max 12th their pace deserved(and that is with failures) he would have had to admit they didn't harvest enough there either.
It's also not realistic to use his words always as gospel, not least because he's been misleading at times but the translations of his words aren't always going to be accurate.
For instance above when he said
I take the meaning entirely differently to some in this thread. I take that to mean the MGU-K is too powerful, drains the available energy too quickly and the mgu-h which has suffered reliability issues all year, overheating and other failures, thus it's a problem that they need to run the mgu-h as much as they do... which still isn't enough."This circuit is very difficult for our power unit because the MGU-K is 120kw, but MGU-H is applied more time on the straight, so it is very difficult for us."
IE if the MGU-K was 60KW they would have less trouble with the MGU-H/turbo/harvesting/heat side of the engine.
Every single sign throughout the season is Honda have drastically less power to deploy than everyone else. Every team is seemingly harvesting a lot more through the mgu-h than mgu-k regardless of track, how much more changes depending on track but it's almost always much more. Honda say they have a better ice than Renault yet pale in comparison in performance, both have a mgu-k capable of outputting 120KW, Renault supposedly has good mgu-h harvesting...... but the mgu-k is the problem for Honda?
Honestly for 90% of the time since the first preseason test the compressor/mgu-h has been considered the troubled area, but based on a couple of sentences recently, which can obviously be translated/interpreted in multiple different ways, it's suddenly the mgu-k that is the problem.
In reality the mgu-k has very few limitations. It's placement means making it bigger is realistically very easy. It's not in the V of the engine, it can be made bigger because it's only limited on one side by the engine. INcreasing cooling or capacity IF they were problems would be fundamentally easy and wouldn't require changing the layout of the engine. LIkewise as I've said before, they've changed the turbo and mgu-h but haven't updated the mgu-k. If the harvesting worked and the mgu-k didn't and it would gain them a couple of seconds a lap easily(if the power was harvested but couldn't be applied) they would do this and had the tokens to do so.
