F1 News
Honda target qualifying as a way of beating the top teams
Honda won their first race in the Hybrid era of Formula 1 last weekend at the Austrian Grand Prix and they are still desperate to continue to improve. The Japanese team wants to improve their qualifying performance as they feel that this is an area that they can get more performance from. Red Bull will hope that the Honda engine will continue to develop and that they can push for more race wins this season.
“We see a bigger gap in qualifying to the others,” said Honda F1 chief Toyoharu Tanabe to Motorsportweek.com. “In the race, we’re still behind but not as much as in qualifying.
“It means that in our next step we need to catch up with them more in qualifying, but it’s not easy. We try to use our power unit as hard as we can, but it’s not easy [for] it [to] go higher immediately.”
In this era of Formula 1, the cars really struggle to follow each other and therefore performing well in qualifying is essential for a good result during the race.
Honda hopes to match last weekends result but still believe that there is a big gap to the two top teams.
“Of course this result encourages the members of our development team but from the beginning of the season we could really see a big gap to Mercedes and Ferrari,” Tanabe said.
“We were strong [in Austria], but for the next race, I cannot guarantee we’ll be strong, that we’ll have the same competitiveness compared with the others."
Red Bull will hope that they can match their performance at the British Grand Prix next weekend but will expect both Ferrari and Mercedes to bounce back.