Del Boy wrote:I think we're stuck with JB at least until Abu Dhabi!! I'm concerned about next year! Magnussen could be team leader and although Lewis handled that in his second season the car was at the end of its development and had input from De La Rosa, Alonso (previous season) and Ron had only just started to concentrate on road car. I hope Mag can handle the pressure!
MP4/30 can be development of MP4/29 albeit with a different power unit. Every interview Jenson does he says they need to find a direction and they have loads of downforce coming (found at MTC). Well if I'd been doing a job for 5 years and still couldn't decide which direction to take I would change career or be told too by my boss i.e fired
I have no evidence and the butterfly suspension hinders direct comparisons but I don't think our Mercedes engine is A spec. If I ran AMG hybrid power I would make sure one of my customers wasn't as quick as my car. We must remember the whole reason Mercedes are in Formula 1 is a marketing exercise.
So I have 2 wishes for 2015 (I've already switched focus!) Honda power unit to be at least as good as Merc PU and McLaren can find a direction before Jenson Mutton leaves.
Next year the Honda engine can't be better than the three engine on the grid today, whatever if we like to get drunk with cold water of what Honda can do this year because they are not running. The fact is that for the development of the next year engines Mercedes has 3-4 teams to provide real track information about the engine, and even they can't develop the engine on the performance front this year, for the next year engines they can. And Mercedes started to work on the V6 engine much much earlier than Honda. You could say that the engine will be good if their engine would have been at the same level of development as Mercedes, but it can't be the case, because they started to work on it much later than Mercedes. And Honda said that they will not test the engine, they will only use the dynos.
Honda will be in the blind, because the information they will get from Mclaren, will come to late and it won't be enough to alter the design of the Honda V6 engine. Honda can only look and can speculate about the engines this years, while Mercedes will have thousands of track conditions. I think Honda will struggle their first year, and sadly they will be not only behind Mercedes, but even behin Ferrari and Renault.
They will struggle, Arai even recognised that in a December interview, because one year behind in track conditions will cost very much. He said that they can't or they won't do real testing, not sure why. The engine is not in the same phase of development as Mercedes engine, next year, their engine will be at the same level of development as Mercedes was at the begining of 2014. Mercedes will learn very much information that will be feed in the development of their next year engine, when they can work on performance. I think Mclaren will struggle even more than this year, whith an engine one year behind in development and with realiability concerns because of the engine. Also Honda doesn't have client team apart of Mclaren to gather more data.
