Honda 'needed' to leave McLaren

Honda boss Yusuke Hasegawa thinks that Honda 'needed' to leave McLaren following a tough few years and believes that working with a new team in 2018 is necessary in order to experience new surroundings and learn more about different types of cars and systems.

The McLaren-Honda partnership has not brought bags of success for either organisation, with most of the problems stemming from a lack of reliability in the vehicles during races this campaign.

As a result, the partnership was not extended beyond the 2017 contract in place, and Honda will now join up with Toro Rosso for the 2018 campaign - a challenge Hasegawa is looking forward to.

"A new challenge and making new relationships with people is always exciting," Hasegawa told Honda's official website.

"From an experience point of view, for this era of Honda, it will be the first time we have changed team and we'll get a better understanding of what a normal situation is.

"We only know things as the McLaren-Honda way, but this will be another opportunity to expand our understanding and experience of a different way of working.

"I think we needed the change.

"From a technical point of view it's good for us to know more about other things, like new cooling situations or how the top speed of a different car design is affected by drag.

"It is very important to understand what the standard is."

The first half of the 2017 campaign was especially underwhelming for McLaren-Honda as they previously switched to a new power united design which focused more on long-term stability rather than short-term power. Despite the lack of success that came from this decision, Hasegawa has no regrets.

"Although we showed some decent performance last year we knew it wasn't good enough to break into the top three, so we needed to change the engine concept," he continued.

"There is no doubt that this was the right direction but we just couldn't complete the package in time for the start of the 2017 season.

"That meant we had to solve many issues at the Grands Prix instead, but unless we tried those modifications there was no chance of going forward in the longer term.

"So that's why we decided to change. I have no regrets in taking that decision."