Following a dreadful season, McLaren are eager to boost their performance for the upcoming season. Despite some technical issues at pre-season test last week, McLaren appear to be back on track, as Button completes a clean day.
Fernando Alonso concluded the first pre-season test a bit earlier than planned, as a small coolant leak kept them in the garage for the remaining of the day. Alonso returned to the car for the first day of the final pre-season test. Although the car’s performance was much improved, an electronics failure did halt the car.
Honda, the power unit supplier of McLaren, has provided the team with some new power unit components geared towards increased performance and reliability. It appears to have paid off, as Button completed 121 laps of running today, setting the fifth fastest time logged today.
Jenson Button believes that the Honda power unit has greatly improved, but stresses that there is still some more work to do:
“This is the biggest improvement in the power unit that I’ve felt in the last 14 months. The progress with the deployment has been massive – Honda has done a great job over the winter and we’ve had no reliability issues with it during testing so far. Honda has been working very closely with Mobil1 and Esso and I think they’ve made a good step forward, but there’s a lot more that we need to achieve before we are competitive.”
Button did suffer a temporary mechanical failure in the suspension, but it was quickly repaired during the lunch break and resulted in minimal track time lost. The day was spent performing long runs to test the car’s reliability, while the team also worked on some setup evaluation for the upcoming season opener in Australia. The long runs have showed definite improvement in the Honda power unit, which the team struggled with last season.
“In terms of the power unit, the slightly updated version we have been running since yesterday is a step forward compared to last week,” said Eric Boullier, the racing director at McLaren. “But it’s still very early days, and we need to do a lot more mileage with it before we can exploit it to its full potential.”
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