Honda will attempt to use its 2007-specification engine at China’s Shanghai race next month.
The Japanese marque’s plan to introduce the updated 2.4 litre V8 at Monza backfired spectacularly when Anthony Davidson suffered two failures in free practice last Friday.
However, now desperate to beat the looming engine ‘freeze’ deadline, Brackley based Honda has made some modifications to the unit in order to try again at Shanghai, rather than be effectively stuck with the under powered current engine for years.
Team boss Nick Fry told Speed TV that the cause of the Monza failures were manufacturing errors.
”So that’s good news for us, because it means that we can reintroduce that engine at the first available moment,” said the Briton.
At Monza, after reverting to the older V8 specification, Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello logged the second and third slowest speeds of the entire grand prix field.
Slowest of all through the FIA speed trap was Sakon Yamamoto, whose Super Aguri is also powered by a Honda engine.
China is all teams’ last chance to introduce a new engine, as the FIA requires homologated engines to have completed two full races.
GMMF1
DailyF1News.com
