Toro Rosso: Honda reliability "has come a long way"

Engine manufacturer Honda has come a long way in terms of reliability, Toro Rosso team principal Franz Tost has revealed, as the Japanese "have exceeded expectations" with the quality of their products.

In their three-year marriage with McLaren, Honda's engines had obvious reliability issues, with the MGU-H in particular always being close to breaking down. That, compared to the lack of power the engine produced, was one of the main reasons why McLaren broke up the partnership in order to run with Renault from 2018 onwards. 

Toro Rosso got partnered with Honda this season, and the two have thrived with each other's company. Pierre Gasly finished fourth in Bahrain, and despite the many penalties the team has taken for mechanical parts being swapped, Toro Rosso insist that Honda's reliability has actually been quite good.

“I was surprised at how good they [Honda] were at the start of the year, given everything that we had seen in the press,” the team's chief race engineer Jonathan Eddolls explained to Formula1.com.

“Through the year there have been two really big updates, the Spec 2 for Canada and then the Spec 3 fairly recently. The Spec 3 in particular saw a really big improvement in power, especially in qualifying, and that has really helped in some of the races.

“Reliability has actually been relatively good.

I think if you look at the number of PU penalties we have taken, it’s very high, and it doesn’t look like Honda has had such good reliability. However, many of those we have elected to take ourselves just to get PUs in the pool when we have had a bad qualifying for instance. Reliability has come a long way and power is now looking good.”

Toro Rosso boss Franz Tost added that Honda "exceeded expectations."

"We thought we would have many more problems but we haven’t had any major issues, and also regarding the performance, with the new specification we are not far away from the top teams.”