By alley - Feb 24, 2017, 12:43 PM ET

’Risky’ Honda overhaul targets '16 Mercedes level

Honda's overhaul of its power unit was "risky" but should allow the Japanese manufacturer to match Mercedes' 2016 level of performance early this season.

The McLaren MCL32

was launched on Friday

at the team's headquarters in Woking, and features a new power unit concept that has been facilitated by the removal of the token system this season. Honda's head of F1 project, Yusuke Hasegawa, estimates the new power unit to be slightly adrift of last year's Mercedes but believes that gap will be quickly bridged.

"Not at the moment I think because I don't know how much gain Mercedes is hoping to make," Hasegawa said. "But of course we are aiming to achieve the top level of the PU, which is Mercedes at this moment, but we don't know how much power they are making now. But I am feeling that we are not behind from them, but I think we will catch up [with Mercedes' 2016 performance] at the beginning of the season."

When it was put to Hasegawa that Mercedes believes it has made a big step forward, he replied: "I heard they did a very good job, which is very unfortunate!

"I really hope we can close up the gap to them, but I don't know the exact number until we run. We have made some progress and I hope we can close up the gap."

Fernando Alonso says McLaren knows it is unlikely to win races immediately but accepts Honda needed to take a "risky" approach to be successful in future.

"Starting from that basic let's say we need to work hard, clever than anyone else, and I think what we did until today has been into that approach," Alonso said. "So we started the 2017 car early enough, we put a lot or resources in this year's car even last year, we stopped a little bit, we changed the philosophy of the engine, obviously risky but needed if we needed to win because the engine we used in the last years was not good enough to keep fighting or developing."