There are a few reports in Japanese media that Honda had a qualifying mode available, but it was outlawed by tighter FIA rules. I guess it was based around oil burning, as what else is available, and recently tightened-up in the regulations ?
I forget where I first saw this mentioned (might be here, might be on autosport's forums), but a post over at
autosport brought it up again. The links provided are to a Japanese web-site, where only a paragraph of a subscription article is visible, and of course they are written in Japanese, so machine translation has been used by the poster.
The links are
http://members.f1-life.net/race/59657/ and
http://members.f1-life.net/race/59662/. Obviously it's hard to judge how reputable the site is for me, and it's hard to know much without access to the full article, but I thought it was interesting anyway.
If true, it's bad timing for Honda as just as they implement this, it's outlawed (seems the regulations changed just before the Italian GP). Then again, the very smoky Mercedes probably has it developed to the last degree, so maybe not so bad (edit : forgot about Mercedes changing engines just before the regulation update, e.g. see
this article on crash.net). Hopefully Honda's developed some expertise in this area which is still applicable within the tightened regulations.