New Aguri, old Honda are ‘different’ – Fry
Super Aguri is supported significantly by the Japanese carmaker, but despite the close relationship Honda team principal Nick Fry played down suggestions that the 'SA07' will be simply a copy of the 2006 works car.
Leafield based Aguri has been testing all winter with what is effectively last year's Honda, and the team is not due to unveil its new racer until mere days prior to the first race.
Amid the heightening argument over so called 'customer cars', observers suggest that the late launch is designed to give Super Aguri's critics little time to mount formal protests.
Indeed, speculation also hints that news of Aguri's failure to pass an FIA crash test recently may have been designed as an illusion that the SA07 is all-new.
"Their car will be different to our last year's car," Fry is quoted as saying by Speed TV, adding that the SA07 is "very, very different" to the 2007 Honda.
With the intellectual rights supposedly transferred from Brackley based Honda, the 'new' Super Aguri has been built at the Japanese carmaker's R&D facility in Tochigi (Japan).
Fry admitted that some similarities between the 2007 Aguri and last year's Honda are inevitable.
"There are people in Aguri now who came from us. Mark Ellis has moved over there, to name but one," he said.
"(So) it will be wrong to say that the (design) thinking won't be the same, because they are the same people."