Explaining his company's current predicament, Honda's Koji Watanabe reveals some of the reasons why it is so far behind.

"As you know, we are struggling in on-track performance at this moment," he admitted in a masterpiece of understatement in Suzuka today. "I believe that there are several reasons..." he continued.

"The first one is that, yes, of course, the new power regulation is quite challenging for us," he said. "The second one is that we stopped Formula 1 activities at the end of 2021 and announced to return to Formula 1 in 2023, so there is some period that during that period our Formula 1 activity was quite limited.

"It also took a bit of time for us to rebuild the organization to restart Formula 1 development," he added, which begs the question, was Aston Martin made aware of this before agreeing the partnership.

Told that Adrian Newey has claimed that he only became aware of how dire the situation was in November, Watanabe replied: "Basically I think that it's a misunderstanding. Basically, our policy is to rotate the engineers of the motorsport regularly to mass production or more advanced technologies like jet or eVTOL or hydrology or something like that.

"So that is, we continue to rotate from the beginning. Probably my explanation is not enough. Also, of course, as I said, to rebuild the organisation took a bit of time, so that was his worry, I think. But now we have sufficient organisation and talent.

"Now we are working closely with Aston Martin," he continued, "not only technical area but also overall area, how we can build a strong partnership together with them.

"So, Aston Martin and Honda is not only F1 constructor and power manufacturer, but also, we are working closely as one team. Actually, in our facility in Japan, the engineers from Aston Martin Aramco are really working hard closely with our engineers in Sakura, working together. So, I think most important is that we can keep moving forward step by step.

"At this moment we are focused on how we can improve the situation of vibration, mainly damage to battery area, but also this time for Suzuka we have improved energy management situation for more driving performance," he explained. "We have some recovery plan together with Aston Martin, but we cannot tell that today," he added.

"The most difficult point is that we started the development a bit later compared to the others. Also, in the test on the dyno the vibration is acceptable level, but once we integrate in the actual chassis, that vibration is getting much more than the test on the dyno. So, of course only PU cannot solve the problem, only the PU, so we are really closely together with Aston Martin to solve the problem, not only the power unit but also together with the chassis."

Asked if the current engine can be upgraded this season, or a new design prepared for 2027, he replied: "We need to improve not only the reliability but also performance. Under current regulation it's difficult to improve the performance itself, so currently we are focused on how to improve the reliability and also, within the rule, we have to improve the performance."

Check out our Friday gallery from Suzuka here.