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Honda's Yusuke Hasegawa has admitted that losing the deal to supply Sauber with its engines for next year was very bad for the outfit and a big blow to their aspirations. The deal was made in principal by the Russian Grand Prix this year to start in the 2018 season, when Monisha Kaltenborn was still team principal.
However after Kaltenborn departed in late June, there was a shift in direction for the team with Frederic Vasseur taking the team in a new direction, away from the Honda engines which were sure to hurt the teams competitiveness, and managed to negotiate a deal for newer Ferrari engines instead.
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This was clearly a blow for Honda, with Hasegawa saying on the matter: "of course it is very disappointing, It is a customer team program so it doesn't hurt our program very much, but we still expected to get the opportunity to get our engine running more. We would have got more data and been able to make comparisons, so it is very disappointing. More than that, on the practical side, we had to stop the preparation, so it is very bad."
He then went into detail about how he had very little clue beforehand, despite having close relations with Sauber technical director Jorg Zander, although he admitted he was not the leader of the meetings between the two outfits. He said on the matter: "I wasn't in the meetings, that was Yamamoto-san, Zander and I were in very good communication all the time. We both didn't believe that we would have to stop this collaboration until the final moment."
Sam Gale
Azerbaijan Grand Prix
C. Sainz jr
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