With the Formula One racing season coming close and getting to open in Australia in March this year almost each team is getting their gear ready to start with full colors. Recently McLaren decided to have a revised Honda engine this season as the former world champions seek to push their way back among Formula One’s frontrunners.
McLaren technical director Tim Goss told the team website that “For 2017, the Honda engine architecture and layout have been altered to serve both for performance and packaging needs,” “The new power unit takes much of the learning from the past two seasons, but has been specifically redesigned for this season.”
McLaren finished sixth overall last season after a dismal 2015 in which the started a new partnership with Honda, after years of Mercedes power and ended up ninth. Now this is time for the team to pull up socks and do something to get their performance shine in a right manner. The most successful team after Ferrari, with eight constructor’s titles and 12 drivers’ championships have not won a race since 2012. So, this is a long time after which McLaren needs to work something either a strategy or a way out in which they can show that they deserve something better on the track.
With the restriction on engine development being lifted thus allowing Honda to overhaul a tightly packaged size zero design that has been plagued with reliability problems while Mercedes have dominated. McLaren is the only team using the Japanese engines. Now this new season will also feature far bigger tyres and revised aerodynamics making the 2017 cars faster and with more aggressive looks.
Tim Goss said, “This season’s changes rank as some of the most significant we’ve ever had in the sport,” “That’s likely to change the competition order — because it’s such a big disturbance… but then what normally happens is that the best, and most well-equipped, teams tend to rise to the top again.”
Goss said drivers expected the cars to be more challenging to drive and a knock-on effect would be that some corners would no longer be treated as corners because they could be taken without lifting from the accelerator. “As the new cars will be going faster, some of 2016’s ‘corners’ will be classified as ‘straights’,” he further added “But because they (the drivers) will be going through them faster, they’ll be subjected to more G-forces — and that’s still tiring on the body.”
