By Edd Straw
Saturday, March 14th 2015, 11:47 GMT
McLaren-Honda’s poor qualifying performance for the 2015 Formula 1 season-opening Australian Grand Prix was partly down to having to run its engines detuned.
Thanks to a pre-season test programme blighted by problems, Honda has limited experience of running in higher track temperatures.
In order to be certain of reliability and not risk losing one of the four power units allocated to each driver for the season so early, this conservative approach was taken with the way the engine package, particularly the MGU-K that is integral to the hybrid system, was run.
Jenson Button and Kevin Magnussen ended up slowest in qualifying, ranked ahead of only the two Manor cars that failed to run, and were at the foot of all of the speed traps.
