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'Trouble-free day! No joke': Honda-powered Toro Rosso F1 car debuts

LONDON — Honda's Formula One partnership with the Toro Rosso team got off to a positive start on Wednesday with a seemingly smooth track debut of their new car on a limited mileage filming day in Italy. "Trouble-free day!! No joke," commented French driver Pierre Gasly on Twitter. New Zealander Brendon Hartley, who was at the wheel of the TR13 car at the wet Misano circuit, reported on Instagram that "the new girl ran super smooth." This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. Honda is starting over with the Red Bull-owned team this season after three seasons of failure with former champions McLaren left the Japanese engine manufacturer's reputation in tatters. A behind-the-scenes documentary, "Grand Prix Driver," released on Amazon recently shone a spotlight on the tension between McLaren and Honda that eventually led to the relationship tearing apart. It also revealed how the troubles had started before the launch of the car and were fully exposed once testing in Barcelona started when the car broke down repeatedly due to engine failures. This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. McLaren, who finished ninth out of the 10 teams last season, is now using Renault engines and hoping to be far more competitive. How Toro Rosso, and McLaren, fare this season will be among the intriguing sub-plots to the 21-race season that starts in Australia on March 25, with Mercedes and Ferrari again expected to be the frontrunners. Italy-based Toro Rosso, one of the smaller outfits on the starting grid, has taken the cynicism and gloom-mongering about its prospects in good heart. It put out a tongue-in-cheek Q&A at the time of the first engine fire-up that included the questions: "Did it take like six attempts to fire up?", "Did the engine blow up?" and "Did your factory catch fire after the engine started?" The respective answers were "Nope, the engine fired up on the first attempt," "Quite the opposite, it started just as planned" and "Our factory is perfectly fine, thanks for the concern." The final 'question' was simply, "Good luck, you'll need it." Reporting by Alan BaldwinRelated Video: Motorsports Honda McLaren Racing Vehicles F1 toro rosso

McLaren P1 GTR hits the track with its spiritual ancestor [w/poll]

Unless you're one of the squillionaires who'll be taking part in its custom-tailored track program, chances are slim that you'll ever see the new McLaren P1 GTR ripping around a racing circuit. Chances are even slimmer that you'd see it running in tandem with the legendary, Le Mans-conquering McLaren F1 GTR from which it takes its inspiration. Fortunately, the British racing team turned exotic automaker has released footage of exactly that, with both track-tuned supercars decked out in the same yellow and green livery. The new GTR, in case you missed the news, is a new track version of the McLaren P1 hybrid hypercar. It's lighter than the road-going version and packs more power (along with a series of other upgrades) to make this one of the most extreme machines Woking has ever offered to private customers. Whether it's faster than the F1 GTR, however, is another question – and one which we'd pay good money to see answered, or better yet, answer ourselves. In the meantime we're looking forward to seeing McLaren take the wraps off its new track machine at the Geneva show.

How McLaren will double its output this year

McLaren Automotive is aiming to almost double its output this year, to 3,000 cars, and hit 4,000 cars per year by 2017. That's over 50 percent of Ferrari's annual production, yet the current McLaren Automotive is only six years old, based about 40 miles southwest of London in Woking. In pursuance of its lofty plans, McLaren recently announced a massive expansion its operations and is hiring another 250 assembly staff for a second shift, which will bring its total headcount to 1,750. Is it chutzpah, or rank stupidity? McLaren made just 1,654 cars last year, including the last of the 570-strong run of P1 supercars, which had an average transaction price of $1.35 million each, and all 40 or so track-only P1 GTRs, which sold for over $288 million. January saw the last P1 GTRs running down the track at Woking. Is it chutzpah, or rank stupidity? And while these cars cannot have been cheap to design and build, it's not hard to see how profitable they will have been. Given that much of the research and development (R&D) will have been amortized in the years up to the 2013 launch of the P1, the profit level has soared in subsequent years. In 2014, its second year of profit and under the leadership of chief executive Mike Flewitt, McLaren Automotive generated a profit before tax of $21.7 million, compared to $6.53 million in 2013. Turnover grew from $413.6 million in 2013 to $688.9 million in 2014. To be fair, the company is investing almost 20 percent of that turnover in R&D ($132.9 million in 2014, $97 million in 2013) and it says that level of spend as a proportion of turnover will continue, with last year's R&D cost estimated at $173.7 million. View 22 Photos In its defense, McLaren says that as a late comer it is still growing in China, which Flewitt has said could well be McLaren's second largest market in 2016 after the US and ahead of the UK and Germany. He also says that the company's growth plans are based on actual orders rather than theoretical expectations, and that since it is (and has been) profitable at 1,500 cars per year, there is some protection against a downturn. But the cars it has to sell this year are a far cry from the exotic and phantasmagorical P1 or the P1 GTR, which were only sold to existing P1 owners. The Sports Series, while being based on shared carbon-fiber tub and the same Ricardo-built 3.8-liter twin-turbo V8 engine and seven-speed twin-clutch transmission, is a much cheaper car.