Captain Hammer wrote:Honda won't be at much of a disadvantage. Whatever disadvantage they have will not be remedied quickly. It will take time to gather data on the performance of the engine. That data needs to be turned into useful information, and only then can solutions be developed. Remember when it became apparent that Renault were in trouble last year? They admitted that they would not be able to turn their season around until the British Grand Prix at the earliest. Honda will face a similar predicament. Mercedes, Renault and Ferrari, on the other hand, all have what Honda do not - a year's worth of primary data to work with.
I suspect that the FIA will do what they have done with Korea and engineer a loophole for Honda. Ferrari and Renault have scored a major coup by getting this concession, but so long as the FIA try to force the homologation of the Honda engine, it presents a major barrier to entry for new manufacturers who will see it as being forced to run a fixed engine while everyone else gets a concession. But at the same time, they won't be able to recant and let Honda develop away, because that will just put power in the hands of the manufacturers - and given that the Strategy Working Group reportedly rejected a plan to save £20 million per year without any discernible change in performance, that's a scenario the FIA will be keen to avoid.
Given that it will be at least six months before Honda can make any meaningful changes to their engines, I suspect the FIA will let this run its course, closing the loophole for 2016 and discreetly give Honda some leeway and/or limit the ability of Renault and Ferrari to develop their engines in 2016 (by which point the engines should already be very good).
Well, James Allen makes a couple of points that suggests, in some ways, it is a double edged sword for Ferrari and Renault if they do not homologate their engines immediately.
Some parties suspect Mercedes are planning on bringing their 2015 spec units for the first race, whereas Ferrari and Renault may compete with the 2014 spec engines instead. Even if Mercedes have found only, say, 10-20bhp, any additional performance they might have unlocked will only increase their existing performance advantage over their rivals: in essence, Ferrari and Renault would be having to gamble that any additional performance they can unlock by extending their development programs later into the season will be enough to overcome any potential deficit in terms of performance and points which they might accrue in the opening races.
It has been plausibly suggested that, if Ferrari and Renault did push back introduction of their 2015 engines, it probably wouldn't be any later than the Spanish GP, in part because it would be logistically easier than trying to introduce a new engine at a flyaway round and in part because the Spanish GP tends to be where the first major upgrade packages are introduced, given that Barcelona is such a well known venue for the teams that they can more easily benchmark the performance of their components. If so, that may give them a couple of months more R&D time, but whether that will be enough to make any serious headway into Mercedes's potential performance advantage is debatable.
Furthermore, there is also the catch that, if the 2014 and 2015 engines are structurally different (for example, if the position of some of the ancillary units like the oil pump were to change), that could cause a few issues with the design and packaging of the 2015 spec chassis. It'll be interesting to see if the teams can adapt to such an issue, not to mention whether some teams might regret delaying introduction of their new engines until later in the season.
Funny to see a post of Honda touring car liveries rather than this:
), rather than tobacco laws.
