diffuser wrote:GoranF1 wrote:A member of neighborly forum Autosport,named @scarbs(not sure if Craig!?) has said that compressor is actually not axial,but normal radial and very small one tucked in the V of the ICE,and that basically Honda did same mistake Ferrari did last year and whit the fix of that area he expect the same jump Ferrari did this year.
The 2 PUs are very different, Ferrari's turbine/compressor/MGU-H are external to the engine while the Honda's are encased. The symptoms are similar, not sure how identical "the same issue" actually is.
Honda's reliability is nowhere near where Ferrari's was in 2014. Honda grabbed 4 new PU total at SPA/Monza and I'm not certain they'll make it to the end of the season with those.
There are many unknowns which you don't see until you get there. As we've seen this year, Honda's PU has many short coming that at this time last year Honda didn't foresee.
In short I think to get to where Ferrari was at the beginning of the year, Honda has further to go than Ferrari did from the end of 2014. They can still do it, even surpass Ferrari, I just think it's less likely.
The outright design doesn't really have to be the same for the mistake to be the same. They blew the design of the turbo/mgu-h in design, size and ability to extract power and led to a crap engine. Ferrari stated during last season that they made the engine they wanted, they compromised the engine for aero just like Mclaren/Honda, which led to the compromised turbo/mgu-h which led to no where near the energy recovery required which led to the bad performance. It's the same sequence of events at Mclaren/honda, not necessarily the same design but certain the same sequence of mistakes.
I've also been saying this since the start of the season. My main worry is that Honda won't fix the engine for next year. My reasoning is, Ferrari seemingly learned what the problem was at the start of last year, fired some engine guys, brought in some specialists in ERS, fuel and had Allison leading the cars direction to help as well. On top of that as you say Ferrari made a solid engine, it was the wrong engine for F1 in 2014, but it was still doing what it was designed to do and not failing every race. Ferrari tested in the lab, came up with that engine and it worked as intended, reliably. After a year they came out with another engine which was again reliable and again did what it was designed to do. Key, it turned up to testing ready, reliable. Merc and Ferrari are testing in a lab, finding problems and bringing a reliable engine to track.
Now we think about Honda, they were convinced this layout/design was actually a secret weapon waiting to be unleashed, they finally thought they'd unleased it with upgrades and only right after the last upgrades started talking about a layout change. So it appears outwardly(not necessarily the case internally) that they are making the same layout switch Ferrari did but 5-6 months later, giving them 5-6 months less time to change the engine, test it and fix the problems they find. Other key differences, they are refusing to bring in outside help, experience is to a degree a short cut, their engine guys obviously didn't get ERS right, doesn't mean they can't but they didn't immediately see the problem so their guys have to learn while bringing in guys with that knowledge would be far quicker. The other key difference is Arai has stated they didn't find key reliability problems with the engine in the lab...if their testing is insufficient then I see them turning up next year again with a engine that hasn't found the problems which means they'll have reliability problems.
Can honda make a good and reliable engine, perfectly possible, but when you weigh up the differences, the lack of time, lack of bringing in help, testing problems, reliability problems. They have a hell of a lot more work to do than Ferrari and half the time to do it. Ferrari were starting from a reliable base, Honda aren't.
I hope they'll do okay and I'm sure they'll do the bigger compressor/bigger turbine/more space for mgu-h/better cooling that Ferrari adopted and this should improve power and could help with reliability also but I still think even if they jump 1.5 seconds a lap forward and get towards 5-6th in several races they'll have a significant number of failures.