Honda Motorsport boss Yasuhisa Arai has said Honda had the capabilities to supply a second Formula One team with a power unit despite Ron Dennis claiming otherwise.
Red Bull were thought to be interested in taking a Honda engine for the 2016 season after their falling out with Renault but Ron Dennis vetoed this so the deal could not progress.
At the time, Ron Dennis said, “It was fully supported by Honda that we didn’t have the capacity to engage another team”.
But in what looks like another blow to the McLaren and Honda relationship Arai has now come out and suggested Honda did in fact have the capacity to supply a second team in 2016 and they have the capacity to supply further teams from 2017 on-wards.
In an interview with Autosport Arai elaborated “We are always open to supply a customer team,” Arai told Autosport. “The year of 2017 and 2018, we are always open.”
Arai said Honda would discuss any customer supply with McLaren should a request be made.
“We can’t go into details of the contract, but we do have to discuss as a team beforehand,” he said.
“If there is a request or if we are thinking about offering to a second or third team, we will always openly discuss with McLaren.”
Honda and McLaren suffered a long and frustrating season last year with then regularly retiring from races due to poor performance and reliability. Many believed a second team using a Honda engine would in fact help McLaren and Honda overcome the issues they have suffered far quicker but Arai doesn’t fully agree with that.
“I don’t think so because the ‘size zero’ concept is unique to McLaren-Honda so whether that power unit will work with a customer team, we don’t know”
“One thing I can be sure of is that if we had a second team the progress in reliability would increase but I don’t know about performance.”
In remains to be seen if Honda has managed to fix its power issues over the winter break but they cannot be much worse than the 2015 season.
