Andres125sx wrote:When every manufacturer is on its very first season perfomance is refered to manufacturers with same experience than you, that´s very different to competing with manufacturers who have a whole season experience when you have no experience at all. Perfomance is always dictated by the comparison with the rest of the teams
Also, my impression is on first season manufacturers focused more on reliablity than perfomance. All of them tried to be as fast as posible, but in first season there was a lot of talk about lack of reliability, how many retirements we were going to see, etc. so I think most of them thought reliability could be a key factor, or that´s my impression after watching 2014 retirements, they were a lot less than expected. But Honda tried to build a PU to compete with the best, so they focused on perfomance more than reliability, probably with the intention to later solve the reliability problems without using tokens, since some retirements this season were not a problem, it was a test season anycase
Unluckily they missed both targets, but I think you can´t compare first season of Honda with first season of the rest, the targets were different
Quite regardless of the goals, the point was that all three made significantly better engines than Honda has without any on track testing. Track testing is being used as a crutch, the vast amount of engine R&D is being done in labs off tracks, tested on dynos and going back to redesign stage.
ON track testing can direct where they believe they need more power and feedback on which bits brake is obviously useful but things will break on the engines running in the labs.
AS for the goals, Mercedes went for a risky/aggressive design that was absolutely intended to have good performance. Every engine manufacturer is attempting to make an engine that both perform and can finish races. It's illogical and a cop out to suggest anyone would attempt to have different design goals. How would finishing every race dead last help anyone? Lets say Mclaren/HOnda had reliability... but finish where they have, meaningless. If they only focused on performance, were 3 seconds faster than everyone else but failed on lap 3 every race. The goal of every manufacturer is the same, pace and reliability, Merc hit the target on both, Ferrari mostly hit on reliability didn't get performance first year, improved it drastically this year. Renault did okay on performance less good on reliability and managed to go backwards this year.
Honda made a bad engine, nothing more or less complicated than that and they had a 3-4 month head start on track testing as opposed to the other teams in their first year. Track testing isn't and hasn't been the relevant factor in why Honda are failing.