Honda's Formula One chief Yusuke Hasegawa has admitted that Honda's pride has taken a hit since their return to F1 last year.
The Japanese marque entered the sport a year after the 1.6 litre hybrid V6 formula was introduced and have been behind rivals Mercedes, Ferrari, and Renault ever since.
Now Hasegawa has said that the lack of success has hurt Honda.
"It was incredibly big," he told RACER. "It's difficult to express, because it was not just coming from McLaren or Ron [Dennis] at the time, but from Honda, the name of Honda and our pride.
"It is very difficult in a competition to guarantee an exact result, but I was thinking we really needed to prove we can do it and to do that we had to show some progress and we had to achieve a decent step up in performance. From that point of view I think we have achieved a good level of progress. If there had been no improvement it would have been a disaster."
Asked if Honda's pride took a hit because of 2015, Hasegawa said: "Of course I wasn't in the team last year but from the outside, yes, obviously.
"Everybody at Sakura [Honda's Japan headquarters], the team members, lost their confidence. But it's fair to say they did a very good job in such a short period. So although we had so many issues, at least they delivered progress with the power unit and I am proud of that."
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