ringo wrote:
What is that sound?
It started off throttle and continued as alonso picked up pace.
Sounds like the usual rough burbling of the Honda PU but more pronounced than before. Maybe they are turning the wick up ? Or trying a different fuel mixture and new lubricants ?
Anyhow, the news from Honda is not good and i think it shows how politics has a way of misdirecting a whole project.
Having the right leadership is very crucial. If you have a project leader/manager that is close minded you will have a lot of problems along the way and i say this looking on what Honda has done from 2015. They refused to listen to outsiders and they were hell bent on pursuing some pipe dream "size zero" philosophy in a blind and very vein manner.
I hope there is levelheadedness and logic applied to how they run things now. The engineers are tools, and their energies need to directed in the right fashion. No matter how good they are, if they are asked to design and develop rubbish, it will just be a well engineered piece of rubbish at the end of the day (not to say the Honda PU project is rubbish, but just using an extreme).
I think it boils down to Arai and others being stubborn over the design direction, while another group of Honda Engineers saw what the problems were and decided to go in a different direction and fix them. Chaos would have been Honda keeping the things as they were and expecting a different result and not allowing the other engineers to have a crack at solving the issues. I don't see that as Honda being weak allowing another team to go off on their own, in fact it's pragmatic and keeps everything in house.
I'm sure the new generation of Honda engineers have learned a lot in the last year and that will be a good thing going forward with the PU project.
So hopefully Honda gets things back on track with this new for 2016 engine. And it would make 2017 even more optimistic if they just scrap size zero alltogether and make a kick ass brute of a PU.
It sounds like Honda is on track engineering wise, it might mean the first few races won't be brilliant as they bring upgrades to the PU but they do appear to be on top of the reliability issues. It's just a matter of finding performance with 2017 in mind. They won't scrap the size zero design unless they come up with a radically different design that leap frogs them to the front. And that does not happen very often in F1/engineering.
People just have to patient with Honda, they have a design path and are for better or worse sticking to it. All be it with tweaks.
