The firm’s motorsport chief Yasuhisa Arai is convinced its reliability issues are now a thing of the past, allowing a change of focus for how it uses its development tokens.

“I am confident our reliability problems are now behind us which means we can turn our attention to increasing power,” confirmed Arai.

“After the summer shutdown our plan is to apply a new-spec engine using some of our remaining seven tokens.

“The most important area for us to concentrate on is the combustion.

“Current regulations require high efficiency of the combustion so we want to change the characteristic with the chamber design and intake and exhaust system layout.

“Another issue we will be addressing is reducing mechanical friction by changing the gear-train system along with the combustion.

“Not all of our upgrades will be in place for the Belgian Grand Prix; some parts will be applied for Spa and the rest during the weeks that follow.”

Arai readily concedes he and Honda underestimated the challenge of returning to motorsport’s top level.

“The sport has changed immensely since the McLaren-Honda ‘glory days’,” he added.

“The current technology is much more sophisticated and it is tough to make a good racing car.

“We knew it wouldn’t be easy, but perhaps we didn’t imagine it would be this hard.

“I certainly didn’t imagine technology-wise what we would be facing, but I have complete confidence in the direction we have taken with our power unit.

“We needed to create something radical in order to beat the top teams, and that is our ultimate goal – to beat the best.”