McLaren boss Eric Boullier admits that he knew that the Australian GP would be a tough weekend – and says that conservative engine settings are part of the reason for the team’s poor showing today.
Jenson Button and Kevin Magnussen will start the race from the back of the grid after Manor failed to run.
“Obviously not enough mileage at the testing, and we knew there were so many things to do and to check and to value,” said Boullier. “It’s true that we went through a lot of systems, but we had even on the last day of testing some issues, so we couldn’t use or run all the tools to exploit the performance of our car, so we were expecting to get into trouble in Melbourne.
“And obviously we tried to hear to achieve more mileage actually than we maybe have done in testing, so at least to be able to run in every session. And to achieve this we had to do some compromises.”
Boullier said that the team knows what it has to do to recover: “We have identified the issues. Actually we had much less issues this weekend than we had during the testing, which is the good news, we do some progresses. Yes there is a fix in place, and we’re working on our absolute recovery plan, if I may call it like this. We don’t want to give a time, we just want to do our best as early as possible.”
Adam Cooper's F1 Blog 
I still think Honda have been stitched up with the development restrictions the FIA have put on them (average of unused tokens by other engine makers). As far as i’m concerned the engine Honda have today is equivalent to the other teams at race one last year. They should be allowed this season to do the same total amount of development the others did through the winter and this season.
I agree. And what is worse is the message this sends to any other manufacturers that are or were considering joining F1 in the future. How can you build a system that complex with no testing, extremely limited development, few units per season and the latter two getting less every year? No other company will want to be subjected to the ever increasing punishment for coming in late and the embarrassment that Honda is facing.
With you guys.
I will disagree. It’s one thing to improve your performance, Quite another to get your car to
Start!
I think it’s a total embarrassment that between Honda and McLaren they can’t manage to run consistent laps. Bruce is likely spinning in his grave.
Fine George, already tagged you as the disagreeable sort anyway 🙂
Just FWIW, how do you see that other engine suppliers might get interested in the series as it is presently presented?
We hear a lot of VW group (which is not likely as long as you-know-who has his rectum pointed southwards) but there’s little incentive for any other builder to join whilst the rules are skewed the way they are. Heck even a Red Bull/Cosworth hook up would face entry rules more stringent then Honda has faced, yet why should this be so?