13/06/2017
NEWS STORY
While Zak Brown last week admitted that McLaren is ninety days away from making a decision on its partnership with Honda, Eric Boullier's emotional reaction in the wake of Sunday's Canadian Grand Prix appeared to suggest the decision is even nearer to being made… assuming it hasn't been made already.
Speaking after a late engine failure robbed Fernando Alonso of a certain points finish on Sunday, Boullier said: "After so much toil and heartache, that single point would have felt like a victory. And then came yet another gut-wrenching failure.
"It's difficult to find the right words to express our disappointment, our frustration and, yes, our sadness," he added. "So I'll say only this: it's simply, and absolutely, not good enough."
With McLaren now admitting its increasing frustration publicly, it is no wonder that speculation is building, a number of British tabloids already claiming that a deal has been agreed with Mercedes for 2018.
At Honda, Yusuke Hasegawa admits the Japanese manufacturer is perplexed, unable to understand how improvements made on the dyno cannot be transferred to the race track, and issues on the track cannot be recreated on the dyno.
"We can't create good conditions on the dyno," he told Motorsport.com. "We need to create the same conditions from the track on the dyno. The operational conditions are different so we need to understand why that makes a difference to the reliability.
"Last year, we could prove engine reliability on the dyno," he continued, "so we need to understand why now there is some difference from dyno to the circuit running... it's not easy. We need to improve the accuracy."
Of the long-standing MGU-H issue, which saw Stoffel Vandoorne suffer a further failure at the weekend, he said: "We have the countermeasure part but we didn't introduce it in Canada because we would get a penalty.
"If we're confident with the countermeasure, strategically we may choose some circuits to introduce it," he added. "We don't want to have a failure on the circuit and take a penalty."