Yup, we'll just have to wait and see. I keep saying that they're planned to suffer these sort of issues initially (perhaps not to this degree though!) in order to get the most out of the package for next year. The problem is if the overheating at Melbourne was down to general heat build up, then Sepang can only be worse. That said, they did appear to turn up Button's engine a little in the race, which hopefully bodes well, and they would have got a heck of a lot of data.
Seems to be a lot of the Honda guy talking pretty openly about the issues, but all relying on translation as the interviews are all in Japanese.
Temps on Saturday meant the intake temps were too much for the engine and they had to turn it down, they are worried about temps in Malaysia as a result(and future races beyond that no doubt). They had to run conservative engine maps due to the temps though it wasn't entirely clear if this was in regards to the ICE or the mgu-k only.
The mgu-k in paritcular struggles very badly in qualifying due to the overall output you can produce in qualifying vs per lap in the race(4MJ vs 2MJ). That is I think where Mclaren are going to have the biggest fundamental issue. He's saying the biggest heat problem is with the MGU-K, it was running at 35% of output so that heat wasn't going to kill it. It's basically tucked up under the engine without enough cooling.
He talks about zero compromise from Mclaren, nor themselves, which makes a fix hard to envisage if neither is willing to make changes to location/chassis to get air/cooling to it. He was specifically asked about opening up holes in the chassis for cooling and said nope, no compromise from Mclaren, asked about if they can improve cooling to it, no, no compromise. How can you fix it or improve temps if neither party is willing to make the necessary compromise?
You can only harvest 2MJ per lap from the MGU-K, but an unlimited amount from the MGU-H. The Honda specs were said to be 4MJ output for the mGU-K in qualifying but only 2MJ in the race and he made multiple mention of not using MGU-K aggressively as once it was used up it was hard to recharge it. That they are specifically calling it 4MJ in qualifying and 2MJ/lap in race and talking about how the heat output is very hard to handle, it suggests they've made a design in which they can't harvest more than 2MJ/lap and currently can't even use half of that amount per lap due to heat issues. This is while Merc last year and now Ferrari this year are using way more than 2MJ/lap in the race, how much more is a complete guess but Ferrari's biggest issue was ERS, they underspec'd the turbo, the mgu-h and didn't harvest enough power, improving those parts has improved the engine no end.
It's seeming more and more like Honda did what Ferrari did, underplayed ERS, overplayed ICE but also with a bias towards packaging(Ferrari did that also but without the same size zero concept so cooling/reliability weren't issues). Even if they can sort out heat issues/reliability(which with their comments of not compromising the package... is questionable) it's looking increasingly likely that they will be significantly down on overall ERS as Ferrari/Renault were last year. I'm not convinced they'll get competitive by the end of the year and I wouldn't be surprised if they end up loosening up the packaging for next year, changing the MGU-K location and focusing more on ERS like Ferrari did over winter.
He also said end of the race they simply used more fuel, no lifting and coasting, being aggressive. They were running with crap ERS so crap efficiency and thus going around as slow as required to make the end. They then found themselves 2 laps down with 2 laps of extra fuel.... hence they sped up.
At least we finished! Shame KMags engine blew up 