Honda: We did everything we could to compete with Mercedes

The Japanese manufacturer will leave Formula 1 at the end of the 2021 season and decided to revamp their power-unit ahead of their swansong year.

The early signs have been positive, with Red Bull and AlphaTauri looking very competitive in comparison with their rivals.

Red Bull, in particular, have taken a step up compared to last season and look to be in a genuine fight with Mercedes for both the drivers' and constructors' championship.

Looking back on a busy off-season at Honda, Asaki explained the steps the engine manufacturer took to improve the performance levels of their power-unit.

“The original plan was to implement this new structure PU this year in 2021,” he said. “But then for a variety of reasons, it was decided not to proceed with a brand new PU.

"However, the thinking on this really changed when Honda announced that we would be leaving the sport. I went to President Hachigo, and said to him that we would really like to implement this new structure PU for our last year in the sport. And he kindly accepted that request.

"With the green light given, our engineers got to work on trying to get everything ready for the new season. That was never going to be an easy task, given the scope of the changes being made to the power unit’s architecture."

With Honda having taken the decision to totally overhaul their 2020 engine, Asaki was delighted that they were able to meet a range of "different development objectives".

“First of all we've changed the camshaft layout to be much more compact, and also brought its position lower down so it's closer to the ground. We’ve also had to change the valve angle. The main point of what we've changed was to improve combustion efficiency. In order to do so we had to change the valve angle and in order to do that we had to change the camshaft.

"We've also had to make the head cover lower and more compact, which means that the way that air flows over it has become a lot better. And we've also lowered the centre of gravity of the ICE.

“Another thing we changed is the bore pitch, by reducing the distance between one bore and the next, we've made the engine itself shorter, smaller.

“In the old engine straddling the transmission we also had a bank offset whereby the left bank was slightly offset from the right bank. So what we've done is reverse this offset on the new engine so that the right bank is forward and the left bank is back. I'm sure you'll appreciate this is a completely new engine. And we've been able to bring it to a point where in just six months we've taken it testing without any issues.

“Another point that we've had to think about is the fact that combustion efficiency has go better. And the camshaft output has got better. Due to the rules of physics the amount of energy that can be stored has changed and it meant that the amount of exhaust energy has decreased. So compared to the recovery that we were getting last year, what we're having to do is increase the amount of crankshaft output, and at the same time ensure that there's a good level of exhaust output, exhaust temperature as well.

“So we've had a number of different development objectives and we believe we have met them.

“I believe that we were able to implement everything that we have to in order to compete with Mercedes. We had a lot of cooperation from Red Bull, making sure that we could get the most from this new compact engine. Until the summer we were working on the basis that it was going to be the previous bigger engine.”