ME4ME wrote:What about Honda? It would be greatly appriciated if you could give us some technical insight, once images/footage appear. I truely love technical articles written by engineers themselves, rather than journalists (no offence to anyone)
There's currently so little to go on with Honda (aside from that rendered image that means nothing). Hopefully some pictures will emerge during testing but I suspect that McLaren will be a little bit more careful with hiding the Honda engines than they were with the Merc Unit (the first good pic of the Merc unit came from the McLaren garage in Melbourne).
My worry with Honda has been some seeming indecision, there was talk (I don't know whether it was true) that they were testing in a car both Merc style split turbo and a Renault style unit late last year. To me this means two things: 1) They don't know which one works best so don't understand the requirements as well as Merc (surely the benchmark) and 2) The engine itself hasn't been optimised around one style or the other which means whatever they decide it will already be somewhat compromised.
If that rumour wasn't true (and I feel it isn't) then we can sort of deduce that the initial development (back in 2012/13 was for a Renault style turbo as this was what was used for the CAD render (they would have used a very early CAD model as Merc did with their first renders) so if they did go to Merc style Turbo it would have only happened when they realised what Merc were doing in early 2014. This only leave then a year for a complete tear up of the engine top end and a total re-design of the Turbo, this (in my experience) will not be long enough to iron out all the problems and optimise the design.
I don't know which way they'll go, for me its 50:50, gut feeling is they may have to go for a better developed Renault style Turbo in 2015 while they sort out how to get a Merc style Turbo running for 2016. This will be slightly easier for them as they only have one team to deal with rather than 2-3-4 teams that Merc, Ferrari and Renault have to satisfy.