Honda and McLaren were joined at the hip for the last great legendary era of F1: the Senna era. Now Honda is back, and we'll see if the pairing can breathe new life into the turbo V6 that powers the current F1 generation. McLaren produced this video of the MP4-29H/1x1 during testing at Abu Dhabi last week.
Watch and decide for yourself if the Honda sounds better than the other engines powering the rest of the field:
This is exciting. Many on the R&T team have a serious case of hero worship for anything involving McLaren-Honda. We even managed to convince Hexcel, the composites company from Utah that built the carbon fiber tub of the MP4/6, to loan us a dummy body identical to the one Senna used during the 1991 season. We displayed it proudly in the lobby, an awe-inspiring memento for an office full of racing geeks, and we loved to show it off to visitors. Giving it back was hard, as you can read about here.
By drawing the Senna connection, we don't mean to say that we have any notion that the MP4-29H will usher in some new era of dominance for McLaren and Honda. The car hasn't debuted, and we can't elevate it on nostalgia alone. It'll have to prove itself. But there's nothing wrong with two old friends hooking up for another dance. And a new power plant is always welcome in a sport that has beenutterly dominated this year by the Mercedes-AMG engine. This could be interesting.
