2017 Winter Testing Circuit de Catalunya

My thoughts so far...

- Honda still look shite!
- Renault & Hass have stepped their game up and look like solid midfield teams who are going to be battling with Toro Rosso & Force India.
- Williams looks like they're the 3rd/4th best car with Red Bull.
- Ferrari look to have an upperhand over Mercedes but I would assume Mercedes are sandbagging, Ferrari often go more aggressive in testing.


EDIT: scratch that, Bottass just put an end ot the sandbags a little, he just set a 1:19.310 on supersofts.

What I meant was that the engine changes might be planned, giving them more used engines to analyse.

Well they've only got data from one team and I'm not suggesting the engines might be completely different, possibly different components and settings.
Who knows, maybe they have designed a few different engines, the Brawn car of 2009 was one of three Honda designed for that season and wasn't even the best.

Nice onboard of Bottas' fast time for today. Car looks pretty stable.

When you listen to what Fonzi has to say, you can't help but feel you'd never buy another Honda in your life.



BARCELONA, Spain -- Fernando Alonso says McLaren's Honda power unit is the only problem the team has after another day of limited mileage during pre-season testing.

In three days of testing, Alonso has completed just 148 laps of the Circuit de Catalunya, one less than Mercedes managed between its two drivers on Wednesday alone. With just two days of testing left before the first race in Australia, Alonso said it was clear where the problem was.

"We have only one problem: that is the power unit," he said. "There is no reliability and there is no power. I think we are 30 km/h down on every straight. When you are 30 km/h down on every straight, it is difficult also to have a feeling on the car. Everything feels good, but when you arrive to normal speed you don't know what is going to happen.

"[Analysing] the chassis side is difficult because we are not pushing probably the speed that the others are doing because of a lack of power. The chassis everything feels good, everything feels under control. The car is responding well to changes and everything is working fine. I'm happy with the balance, I'm happy with how I attack the corner. I'm enjoying driving this car, so I don't think that we are too far back in terms of chassis side."

Honda has suffered mechanical and electrical problems with the power unit and discovered a design flaw with the oil tank on the first day. Combined with the usual setbacks in testing, Alonso said McLaren is now lagging well behind its rivals.

"Every lap we do we are improving the situation slowly," he said. "The oil tank was quite an amateur problem that we had that day and then from day one we keep unlocking a little bit the situation in terms of power and in terms of reliability. With more laps you discover other things; temperature in the rear caliper or bodywork that is not properly tight -- things that normally you discover in day one or day two of winter testing.

"As we do 40 laps every day we are in day two of testing and discovering those things. Nothing to worry for Australia, I guess, because the team will be ready to compete at a good level and the only question mark is how much power we will have."

Alonso said that as of Wednesday, Honda was actually down on power compared to last year but is confident more power would come for the Australia race-spec engine.


"This is not the Australia-spec engine but it's an evolution from what we had last week. For Australia we'll have a different evolution, so from that point of view there's still hope to gain some power and reliability with the final version. But last week's spec didn't deliver the results expected and this week's spec is also going bellow expectations. For Australia we'll have to hope for more, we have to be hopeful because the last two specs we worked with didn't match our expectations. We'll see.

"As of today we may have even less power than last year, but we're running with settings that are not even close to the ones we'll use in Australia, for different reasons, for different problems we have in the engine. The full power of our engine won't be seen until we all the problems we are experiencing are sorted."

Asked where exactly the Honda power unit was lacking, Alonso added: "I don't know, it's a question for Honda where they are lacking power. I am not an engineer or an engine designer yet, maybe in the future ... but I don't think it is a deployment issue because many straights here, so in one straight or another you deploy until the braking zone and you lose 30 or 40 km/h in every straight."

That doesn't make sense to me....wouldn't this simply stagnate chassis and aero development? They're running slower than they should on the straights, I'm sure it's not on purpose. If Honda say they aren't running a "Melbourne spec" engine, well then nobody is. But they're running engines which would at least give them a good basis to learn about the car as a whole, not just the engine. And for that you need to run in real time at representative speeds, which McLaren isn't. And they've wasted a week already. So I think Honda is definitely in trouble, again.

Ferrari stated they purposely went the entirety of the first test on one engine.

Remember they get four PUs this year last year's fifth was due to the number of races.

I'm going to go out on a stout limb and say that Ferrari will challenge them in the first half and Red Bull will challenge them in the second half. Neither will be close come Abu Dhabi.