• Australian GP - Qualifying

Honda running 'very conservative' due to higher temps

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Honda is running its engines on "very conservative" settings at the first race of the season in Australia for fear of damaging one of its four power units per car for the rest of the season.

McLaren will start its new partnership with Honda from the back row of the grid at the Australian Grand Prix after both cars qualified a long way off the pace. Jenson Button's best time was five seconds off the pace of Lewis Hamilton's eventual pole position time, highlighting the extent of the deficit to the reigning champions Mercedes.

McLaren has made clear that both car and engine are lacking performance after struggling for mileage in pore-season testing. Honda boss Yasuhisa Arai admitted the higher temperatures in Australia meant the team had to opt for more conservative engine settings compared to the already de-tuned engines it was running in testing as losing a power unit so early in the campaign would create bigger issues.

"We've done a lot of hard work, and finally we are in Melbourne," Arai said. "In Barcelona I expected a good place for us in Australia, but unfortunately we don't have the know-how and experience about running in high temperatures.

"We cannot lose the engine in the first race, so our data set is very conservative for the weekend, so that's the reason why we are down on power with the MGU-K and the engine itself. That's the reason why."

McLaren racing director Eric Boullier said his team went into the weekend expecting trouble.

"We knew there were so many things to do, to check, to evaluate, and we went through a lot of systems. But even on the last day of testing we saw some issues so we couldn't use all the tools to exploit the performance of our car. So we were expecting trouble in Melbourne. Obviously we have tried here to achieve more mileage than we did in testing to be able to run in every session. To achieve this we had to make some compromises.

"Yes we have identified the issues, and actually we have fewer issues this weekend than we had in testing, which is the good news, we have made some progress. Yes, there is a fix in place and we are working on an absolute recovery plan, but as to time we don't know. We just want to do our best to recover as quickly as possible."

Laurence Edmondson is deputy editor of ESPNF1

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