kooleracer wrote:I'm reading a lot assumption that Honda had excess to the Mercedes PU through McLaren. But do you think that Mercedes would McLaren take a race engine back to Woking? Does any Mercedes powered team get to keep the engines after the race weekend? I can imagine they got a test engine for pre-season test to build the chassis around it. But why would Williams FI and McLaren need a working engine at their base? A mock power-unit would be enough wouldn't. I think Mercedes isn't daft enough to let McLaren take the real deal to Woking knowing that they will be running Honda powerunits next year. Does someone knows for sure that McLaren were allowed to keep the engines after race weekends? Of course McLaren has data from the race weekends, but during the race weekends that can't brake the seals. So at what moment McLaren could have dissected PU106A Hybrid at Woking? I assume Mercedes ships their engines to the race weekends and delivers them to the teams at the beginning of the race weekend. When the cars are stripped after the race I assume the teams (or only McLaren) have to pack the engines and hand them over to Mercedes.
No one is saying that McLaren took the engine to Woking, indeed Mercedes brings the engines from track to track where it is then fitted into the Customer Teams Chassis (Be it McLaren or Williams).
What McLaren can do, if they wanted to, is to run the engine in very specific ways during Friday testing to get specific Telemetry data. They can also run different Engine Maps to see how the Engine reacts. They know how the engine delivers power throughout its rev range. You can get a lot of information from by running the engine and analyzing the data from SECU. They also know how the the MGU-K on the Merc engine works.
What everyone on the forum are saying (I think) is that the data gathered by McLaren will be fed to Honda for their PU. This would be completely legal, as the SECU data is proprietary Data of McLaren and result of their testing on the Manufacturer Engine. Not manufacturer Data supplied by Mercedes to McLaren..