- McLaren
Targeting debut win with Honda is only way to achieve goals - Boullier
McLaren says it has to target a victory from its very first race with Honda if it is going to reach its ultimate goal of winning championships.
The Honda power unit made its first public appearance during testing in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday afternoon, with Stoffel Vandoorne completing a tentative installation lap in the McLaren MP4-29H1X1 interim car. The team has this week's two-day test plus three pre-season tests to prepare for 2015's opening race, but despite the short timescale racing director Eric Boullier said McLaren needs to target the very top.
"We all want to go into Melbourne thinking we can win the race," Boullier said. "I know we can dream, but we are pushing to have this target because it's the only way for us to deliver what we want."
Boullier said McLaren is being ambitious in its new partnership with Honda, and after being a customer of Mercedes it is looking forward to becoming a works team.
"It's a challenge for everybody, because obviously these engines are very much high technology. We have been also very ambitious. Both Honda and also McLaren wants to win as soon as possible and the target is obviously to put the right pressure where it needs to be to make sure we can be successful as early as possible.
"It's a challenge but at the same time to have a full dedicated partner like Honda with us and vice-a-versa, it really helps to make some decisions and some steps easier. Not only waiting for something to be given but to develop as a partner and co-operate largely from everything from design to the need to do some technical choices.
"This is still the challenge, but so far to say the relationship we've built is very, very good and very efficient and everything we or Honda put in place between Japan and [Honda's UK base in] Milton Keynes is very efficient."
Boullier said the target of this week's test is to step up the mileage on the new Honda power unit rather than chase performance.
"First, we obviously had a plan that we are already modifying three times this morning! There is obviously a lot of system checks, which means you go run by run. Short runs first, it's not about chassis, tyres or anything like this. It's not about anything else but taking care of different parts of the engine, reliability, energy recovery and checking every code on everything we can.
"It's going to take us about maybe ten runs to go through before we go into another phase, which is putting a longer run to see if there is no default value or anything going wrong after three laps. That is going to be the plan and to gradually try to charge more the engine and try to push to, maybe not the limit in these two days, but put more on the electrical package and recovery trying to see if we can go through the mileage and all the runs. At the end we will definitely not try to set a lap time because we are not working at all on the car, it's to try to push the engine and the recovery system."
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.
