DiogoBrand wrote:One thing I find intriguing and that has been consistently overlooked is McLaren's lack consistency this year. I mean, even when they have a relatively good pace at one circuit, they rarely achieve the results they could.
Almost every time they have a chance of getting a good result, or even finishing on the points, either one car fails to qualify, or gets a DNF.
And the most interesting is that the power unit, while remarkably unreliable, didn't have a part in a good portion of these incidents. We've seen brake ducts blocked by a visor film, crashes, punctures, all sorts of mishaps to hinder them from finishing on a better position than they did. Not to mention that I've seen a lot of people praise 'how Honda has adressed their unreliability issues', and I may be wrong, but to me it doesn't look like they really have. Let's not forget we haven't seen any PU's from them running even close to what they should, which is an average of 3,8 Grands Prix.
So, it's obvious they need to sort their pace for next season, and I believe they will, but I really don't want to see them achieving competitive pace and throwing good results off the window for lack of consistency.
If you looked back through the season all the PU manufactures had issues with their PUs when they introduced token changes. So instability is created with the token updates. Honda went though 3 of those. When they weren't making token changes they were often making large reliability changes to the PU. So I think a high percentage of the PU reliability issues were created from constant change.
The tell tail sign for next year will be the tests in Spain at the end of February early March. The more mileage they can get on the cars in those 8 days the better prepared they'll be for next season.
It is kind of dumb that those 8 days are in back to back weeks, doesn't leave much time to make PU changes from 1 session to the other.
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