F1: Honda pride, confidence hurt by poor return

Honda's pride and confidence was hurt by the struggles it faced in 2015 and led to a more conservative approach to its second season in Formula 1.

Returning to F1 as power unit supplier to McLaren, Honda entered a year after the new engine regulations were introduced and immediately found itself on the back foot. Reliability issues plagued Honda's first season back in the sport, while it also struggled for outright power and endured a difficult campaign.

Yusuke Hasegawa (pictured) took over as head of F1 project from Yasuhisa Arai ahead of the 2016 season and he told RACER the Japanese manufacturer faced a "huge" challenge to bounce back this year.

"It was incredibly big," Hasegawa said. "It's difficult to express, because it was not just coming from McLaren or Ron [Dennis] at the time, but from Honda, the name of Honda and our pride.

"It is very difficult in a competition to guarantee an exact result, but I was thinking we really needed to prove we can do it and to do that we had to show some progress and we had to achieve a decent step up in performance. From that point of view I think we have achieved a good level of progress. If there had been no improvement it would have been a disaster."

Asked if pride was hurt by 2015, Hasegawa replied: "Of course I wasn't in the team last year but from the outside, yes, obviously.

"Everybody at Sakura [Honda's Japan headquarters], the team members, lost their confidence. But it's fair to say they did a very good job in such a short period. So although we had so many issues, at least they delivered progress with the power unit and I am proud of that."

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Hasegawa admits he immediately changed Honda's approach to 2016 when he took over as he had his own set of priorities to try and achieve.

"I did [implement changes], but I didn't recognize I had made changes because I did what I wanted to do. So I don't know what was going on, but we needed to contribute a baseline to start with. [2015] was challenging because we needed to prepare the engine and we were not confident but we couldn't go back. All the time we were trying to prepare, we were always solving issues. So in the winter I asked our team members to construct a baseline to start with.

"It wasn't my decision but over the winter it was clear that the reliability, the ICE [internal combustion engine] and the turbine were the three items that we needed to improve. The reliability was especially difficult to improve because a problem can come from anywhere, and even this year we still had some issues."