Amid Red Bull Confidence, Honda are Staying Realistic

The Red Bull Formula One team are highly confident that they can succeed with Honda. However, Honda motorsport boss Masashi Yamamoto is taking a cautious approach. He confessed that the company won’t try to stay within Formula 1’s limit on engine parts in 2019.

According to the current rules, every driver is permitted use three internal combustion engines, MGU-H and turbochargers. In addition to that, they are allotted two MGU-Ks, control electronics and batteries over the course of a season.

Last year, only Mercedes and Ferrari of the four manufacturers were able to stay within those boundaries. Now, it seems that history may repeat itself this year.

As Honda prepare for a new partnership with Red Bull, reliability is the only question left to answer. Significant gains in power over the past 12 months will mean nothing if the cars cannot finish the race.

According to a quote from GPFans.com, Yamamoto claimed that Honda will be targeting the use of five engines over the season. In other words, the Honda-powered cars will cop penalties in at least two races.

Upgrades are expected at power sensitive circuits like Baku and Canada. However, Red Bull and Honda are reportedly discussing ideal circuits to take potential grid drops.

Monza is a strong candidate along with Hockenheim as overtaking would be easier in theory.

The next big question will be how decisive these penalties will be as Red Bull are targeting a title challenge with Max Verstappen in 2019.

In the Dutchman’s hands the new car completed 30 laps at Silverstone on demonstration tyres during Red Bull’s filming day. A delighted Verstappen even declared that everything had gone as planned.

“I was really excited to jump in the car and as soon as we got going it felt pretty normal,” said the 21-year-old. “It felt good and we had no problems, so I’m very happy with that. Of course today is a filming day, so there’s a limited amount you can get out of it, but it’s really important to have a day like this, before you go to the official tests.

“You get a first impression and you see if there are any little issues with the car or engine. Luckily we didn’t have any and it’s very positive that we had this opportunity. Now we can go testing properly, we’ll see what we can get out of that and we’ll be able to understand the car and the engine a bit better. But so far, so good.”