APRIL 6, 2002

How new is Honda's "new" engine?

THERE has been much talk in recent days of a "new" Honda V10 engine appearing at the San Marino GP at Imola but the reality of the situation is that the engine will be only a slightly different version of the same engine which the Honda teams have been using this year. The first major modification from Honda will not come through the system until the Canadian GP in June and that, the Honda engineers hope, is going to be the one that will make the difference.

The danger of all the pre-Imola publicity is that there might not be much visible improvement from the Honda cars. The Honda engineers now seem to understand what it is that is causing the engine to fail when revved to the kind of levels it needs to reach to be competitive but there is no quick fix to the problem and so anything which will be done before Montreal is likely to have less of an effect than is being suggested.

Honda sources say that the engines are capable of producing the kind of power needed to compete with BMW, Ferrari and Toyota but that at the moment the engines are not holding together.