Pierre Gasly says progress Honda has made with its power unit provides encouragement for both Red Bull and Toro Rosso’s Formula 1 hopes next season.
Honda, following three troubled years as McLaren's partner, joined forces with Toro Rosso for 2018 and next season will also supply Red Bull, the first time it has powered two teams in the hybrid era.
Honda struggled for reliability and performance during its McLaren partnership but has run competitively in the midfield this year.
Its Spec 3 power unit was run for the first time during practice in Russia and was subsequently used in both cars at last weekend’s Japanese Grand Prix, replacing the Spec 2 that was used from Canada.
Brendon Hartley and Gasly qualified sixth and seventh though both slipped outside of the points amid the wrong strategy and excessive tyre wear, with Gasly also hampered by an engine setting issue.
The Frenchman was nonetheless buoyed by Honda's latest step.
“Of course I’m really pleased to see this step forward, it’s really good,” said Gasly, who will join Red Bull in 2019.
“It’s more the development and seeing the fact that when they bring things, it works.
“In Canada they brought an upgrade and we saw it straight away, in Sochi they brought an upgrade and when we tried it we saw it straight away, so I think this is the real positive out of it.
“I know they are still pushing massively, developing massively and testing things, because the target next year will be different to the one we have this year and it’s a big opportunity we have for Honda. But I think it’s looking promising.
“For sure we still have a deficit compared to the top two – Mercedes and Ferrari – but they [Honda] are catching up and this is the most important.”
Gasly added that the performance of the Spec 3 engine should only improve, in light of the relatively short time frame Honda has had to understand its potential.
“We are talking about a couple of tenths, so if you have this it probably would have put me a bit closer to Romain [Grosjean] and a bit more in the fight, so it’s looking really good,” he said.
“There’s a few things to improve but as a first step we’re still discovering and exploring a bit the way the engine works, and there’s some good potential in there.
“I mean it’s new so of course we still need to find out how everything works. They introduced it pretty early. Ideally they would have liked more time on the dyno to test everything.
“I think it’s still good but we can still improve, compared to Spec 2 Spec 2 has less power but better driveability.”
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