That old phrase ‘when God closes a door he always opens a window’ has proven a sweet saving grace for Formula One fans who, deprived of a competitive historic McLaren team battling for championships, were granted the near-as-makes-no-difference #PlacesAlonsoWouldRatherBe in 2015.
The preferred deity of your capital city is a truly merciful being.
It was difficult not to admire the gritted teeth of McLaren’s Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button 18 rounds into an unpredictably awful 2015.
Alonso, his car failing to set a Q1 time, put it on for the cameras on a conveniently placed deckchair and later joined Button’s invasion of the podium before qualifying was over. (The Briton had been knocked out of the session in the first 18 minutes.)
Somewhere Ron Dennis was frowning and thinking angry, adjective-laden thoughts.
They can smile, so the two drivers in question attest, because they have faith that the 2016 McLaren-Honda, with emphasis on the myriad problems that come after the hyphen, will be better. That the might of one of the world’s biggest car companies combined will surely prevail.
Putting aside the painful fact that Honda can hardly get any worse, remaining plausible in the minds of many after a season of such minimal improvement is: will Honda improve enough?
It’s a sobering thought. As has been expressed so many times this season, a McLaren car that has at best pootled its way around world has been an offensive waste of the talent of its two drivers. A second year of making up the numbers with no obvious light on the horizon would be ruinous.
Should the unimaginable happen – again – what can be done about it?
First, the problems.
Last year, before its calamitous season began, McLaren lost £22.6 million (A$48.4 million). The team is without a title sponsor and continues to haemorrhage backers, including Hugo Boss, TAG Heuer, and likely Johnnie Walker.
Add to that the significant lead time required for power unit development plus the stunted growth of the chassis without a competitive engine to test it to its limits and the scale of the problem, should the team find itself on the wrong path, is immense.
The heart of the solution must involve additional testing. Not only has the Honda power unit been notoriously unreliable, but the Japanese engineers have 12 fewer months of data at their disposal. Inevitably season-long poor performances are the result of following ultimately fruitless development paths, sometimes resulting in an expensive and time-consuming engineering wind-back.
But testing as a blanket concept cannot be enough, and indeed in-season testing has been reintroduced to Formula One in recent years to lukewarm response.
Instead targeted testing is the key. Just as most sports – rational sports, so Formula One excluded – fairly reward competitors at the end of each season with a sensible sliding scale of prize money, so too do they have an inverse awarding of concessions.
Think the AFL draft: the lowest-placed team has access to the most desirable draftee – two if you’ve tanked – that theoretically gives it a leg-up for future seasons.
In Formula One teams perennially ranked at the bottom of the constructors championship could earn a greater number of testing days and wind tunnel or CFD hours, buying them time to work themselves out of the holes they’ve dug for themselves.
Smaller teams – or a theoretically cash-strapped McLaren – would be able to cover the costs of testing by selling seat time to reserve or development drivers. Potential investors might consider a stake in a team of more promising venture if any concessions are enough that an injection of cash and engineering talent at the right time can found a competitive car.
The beauty of a concession format is, unlike the sport’s current proposed solution to balancing the price of its power units, the regulations that govern the cars while on track during race weekends remain the same. The tweaking takes place only behind the scenes, where it is most likely to create a lasting benefit rather than mask performance differences.
Run successfully and a formula for performance concessions could stave off talk of three-car teams, ‘super-GP2’ cars, customer cars and possibly even a second engine standard.
Formula One is so often rightly referenced as a hotbed of technological development and engineering expertise – sometimes so much so that the sport gets carried away with itself – but it could be the exploiting of those same qualities that ultimately balances out the field and leads to a fairer formula.
I think that, given the choice, the cockpit of a car putting testing kilometres on his Honda engine would be the place Alonso would rather be. Beats a trackside folding chair in Q1.
Follow @MichaelLamonato on Twitter.
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