Vasseur puts Honda breakup on McLaren gearbox quandary

Sauber team boss Fred Vasseur says uncertainties surrounding the future of the McLaren-Honda partnership justified its decision to cancel its deal with the Japanese manufacturer.

Sauber would have relied on McLaren to supply a gearbox to the Swiss outfit, but the prospect of the Woking-based outfit eventually changing engine suppliers prompted Vasseur to call oof the deal.

“Leaving aside the current issues that Honda has with reliability or performance, as I know that they will come back at some point, the biggest concern for us was that we could not secure the responsibility of the gearbox,” Vasseur told the official F1 website.

“We don’t have the resources internally to build our own gearbox, so we knew that we had to deal with someone.

• Sauber won’t be turned into Ferrari B team, insists Vasseur

“With Honda we would have to deal with McLaren, but I was not so confident that McLaren would continue with Honda.

“So it would have created a strange situation: asking McLaren to provide the gearbox for a Honda engine when McLaren could be running another engine.

“With this kind of scenario I was absolutely not confident. So the ‘reprocessing’ of the Honda deal was one of the biggest issues for Sauber.”

Ultimately, Sauber extended its deal with Ferrari, although the new multi-year agreement will provide the team with up-to-date engines, and not year-old specs as is the case this season, an arrangement which most teams – starting with McLaren – would die for compared to the prospect of relying on Honda power.

“Sauber had already started the design of the 2018 car before I took the decision and that was the reason for the rush – so as not to throw good money at abandoned projects,” added the Frenchman.

“The design was already in progress, then there was the factory shutdown, so we had to take the decision right away. 

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