Ron Dennis' Red Bull Racing fear

“I don’t think crisis is too strong a word now for the situation Honda find themselves in,” Sky Sports commentator Martin Brundle was moved to say just one lap into the Mexican Grand Prix.

“It looks like it is going from bad to worse.”

Oh the travails of McLaren-Honda. From the lofty expectations of victory while nestled in the safety of 2014 to the cold and friendless reality of life in 2015, the Formula One season has become an eternal siege on the credibility of two highly regarded engineering businesses.

The year has yielded just 27 points spread across six points-scoring finishes and 13 DNFs, including two failures to start. Performance has been poor, but reliability has been poorer – and it was Fernando Alonso’s first-lap retirement in Mexico City that prompted Brundle’s blunt assessment of the partnership that once dominated the sport.

It was somewhat surprising, with all that considered, that Formula One’s most volatile team, Red Bull Racing, was making tentative steps towards negotiating for a supply of Honda engines next season.

Red Bull, it mustn’t be forgotten, is without an engine supply contract for a season that begins in little more than three months, because it found Renault’s performance to be an unacceptable match for its high standards.

That it finds itself at Honda’s door is amusing, to say the least – but perhaps fractionally less so than returning to Renault, cap in hand.

Underwriting the approach, though – and the reason McLaren has been able to submerge its dissatisfaction with the “crisis” for the most part – is the widely held belief, whether planted by Honda’s decades-old success in the sport or not, that the Japanese firm will get it right eventually.

“We cannot discuss details at this moment, but we have been approached by a team and the discussions are ongoing,” said Honda motorsport chief Yasuhisa Arai.

“Nothing has been decided. I have always said this season that we are always open [to supplying other teams].”

Indeed, Bernie Ecclestone explained during the week that in exchange for supplying only McLaren this year, he had obliged Honda to supply two teams in its second year and three in its third to break up the two-tone silver-and-red engine landscape dominating the grid.

If Honda’s power units were successful, teams would be naturally interested, and if they were not, Honda would surely be willing to double and later triple its collectable engine data to speed up the development process.

So it is that two Formula One powerhouses find themselves competing for the same theoretical power unit – but with Red Bull having cut itself as a controversial figure over its brief history in the sport and with McLaren being driven by Ron Dennis, himself no stranger to controversy, sparks were always likely.

Unknown to all bar McLaren – and maybe even Honda, given Arai’s apparent willingness to entertain negotiations – Dennis, upon leading Honda back to Formula One, had negotiated himself a veto over any Honda power unit supply deal.

On the surface the decision is a mere question of competition. As Dennis’ second in command, racing director Eric Boullier, said in Mexico, “Clearly there is an issue at Red Bull, which was created by Red Bull and not by anybody else.

“We are not a charity foundation, so we are not here to help.”

Moreover, there is a feeling of ownership driving the denial. McLaren worked hard to return Honda to Formula One and rekindle the old magic of the McLaren-Honda brand, and it wants to claim that narrative for itself.

But there is a third, more devastating, motivator for Dennis’ mobilisation: imagine if Red Bull Racing were to take a supply of Honda engines and win.

Not only would such a thing prove immensely embarrassing considering McLaren’s toil this season, but in one fell swoop it would totally undermine McLaren’s entire purpose for racing in the current regulatory framework.

You can only be truly successful in a works relationship? Shown to be a sham. McLaren is building top-line chassis that are being let down only by a flawed power unit? Completely debunked.

Worst of all, how would McLaren answer to the charge that it had taken Honda’s engines for free and had Honda pay for its driver salaries, among other transactions, only to be shown up as squandering it all when a mere customer team beats the sum of all those parts on track? It would be an unmitigated disaster for one of the sport’s proudest teams – and for Ron Dennis, whose Formula One end would surely be brought about by such competitive catastrophe.

All of this remains hypothetical for the time being, of course – with the Honda engine underperforming so woefully, it’s difficult to assess exactly where the chassis sits, and it turn how efficiently the team overall if performing.

But for the man behind the team it’s hard not to be gripped by fear at the thought that such a merciless deconstruction could be a simple signature away.

Follow Michael on Twitter @MichaelLamonato