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Honda’s Formula 1 engine chief Toyoharu Tanabe has expressed his surprise at the amount of power unit penalties rival Mercedes is getting during their 2021 title battle.
A run of internal combustion engine problems has led to all the Mercedes runners now taking at least one grid penalty for going over their allocation of power unit components.
Championship contender Lewis Hamilton will take his second such penalty in four races at this weekend’s Brazilian Grand Prix.
“I am very surprised they are changing the ICE frequently,” said Tanabe.
“Actually, I cannot believe what’s going on and why.
“But from the PU manufacturer point of view it’s kind of disappointing to get a PU penalty for the driver.
“I’m sorry [for Mercedes] about that.”
Red Bull-Honda’s Max Verstappen has also had to take a penalty for exceeding his power unit component allowance, doing so at the Russian GP in September.
Tanabe says there is no expectation that the Honda runners will need to take further penalties in the remaining races of the title fight, in which Verstappen now leads Hamilton by 19 points and Red Bull sits one point behind Mercedes.
“No-one knows the future but if there is no unexpected accident or unexpected failure, we have no plan to put another PU unit to our four drivers,” said Tanabe.
Honda expressing surprise and sympathy towards Mercedes over poor engine reliability is perhaps the best encapsulation yet of just how far the Japanese manufacturer has come from the embarrassing start of its current F1 engine programme, which concludes at the end of this season.
The scale of Honda’s reliability problems when it returned to F1 with McLaren in 2015 made it a laughing stock, with its two cars accruing 330 places worth of grid penalties in the first season alone – albeit when the penalty system allowed for much bigger penalties, often larger than the actual grid size.
Back then, Mercedes was serenely dominating F1. Six years on, Honda is preparing to exit having done what neither Ferrari nor Renault managed to do in this era by putting Mercedes – the engine performance benchmark for so long – on the back foot right to the end of a season.
