Toro Rosso: Honda engines more reliable than expected

Despite using more power units than any other team, Toro Rosso team principal Franz Tost has said that the Honda power units have exceeded the team's expectations in terms of reliability, he has revealed.

Toro Rosso have been partnered with the Japanese since this season after their very unsuccessful relationship with McLaren for the three prior years, which massively damaged their reputation. 

Although there has been a resurrection of sorts at Toro Rosso, with the third spec of the Honda looking particularly powerful, there still have been a lot of reliability issues, as Toro Rosso seemingly take mechanical grid penalties every other weekend. This weekend in Mexico, Pierre Gasly will take another 15-place penalty for switching power units.

Still, Tost insists that reliability has been better than expected with Honda.

"We thought we would have much more problems, but to be honest we haven’t had any major issues," he said during Friday's executives' press conference.

"With the new specification we are not far away from the top teams.”

With Gasly taking that penalty, Tost explained was more of a precaution being taken by Honda than an actual major issue. The thin air in Mexico is known to cause many engines to catch fire.

“After the race in Austin they [Honda] detected on the power unit of Pierre an assembly issue and therefore they didn’t want to take any risks and decided to come here to Mexico with another new power unit.

“We did two laps, decided to change the power unit to the old specification, only because of this very special altitude here and these conditions and therefore Honda thinks they a better knowledge and experience with their older specification to set all the parameters correctly and therefore Pierre will do the race weekend with spec two.

“Regarding the work of Honda during the year, they have so far done a fantastic job because they have improved the performance a lot, and also the reliability. 

"I am really looking forward to the last two races, in Sao Paulo and Abu Dhabi, because there hopefully we won’t have any penalties."