AlphaTauri is confident Honda has made "big steps" in both reliability and performance for 2020.
Since teaming up with the Red Bull sister team in 2018, the demons of the three years with McLaren have largely gone for the Japanese manufacturer, who have now closed right up on Mercedes in particular.
The one slight question mark, however, remains reliability, with neither Red Bull nor Toro Rosso, as they were known last year, completing the season without taking engine-related grid penalties.
However, AlphaTauri team boss Franz Tost believes that can be avoided this season just simply based on winter testing.
“Yes. I think so," he was quoted by Crash.net.
“In the past, we always changed the power unit during testing, and this year hasn’t been the case, we finished everything without a failure and that is one of the first big steps we made already."
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AlphaTauri also heads to Melbourne as one of the dark horse teams in the midfield after a strong pre-season, and the integration between themselves and Honda is key to that.
“This was a big step up, we are working together for the third year with them,” Tost explained.
“If you look at how the power unit is fitted into the monocoque and if you compared to the first year there is a big, big difference.
“Everything Is optimised, from the electric boxes to the water pumps, all this stuff, to get a better centre of gravity, weight distribution, and this of course helps, it’s a performance differentiator.
“And they made big steps forwards also from the reliability side and from the performance side," the Austrian added.
“How much? This we will see after 2-3 races as we don’t know how much the other teams made. We need the comparison and for this, you need 2-3 races.”
