1 March 2015. The garage doors at Spain’s Circuit de Catalunya are closed, and with them is Formula One’s final pre-season test.
Serenity reigned supreme inside the garage marked Mercedes, but behind the doors of former Silver Arrows partner McLaren chaos ensued.
McLaren’s much-hyped comeback with Honda as its engine supplier was in tatters after 12 days of testing. From the get-go it was obvious that Honda’s first attempt at the hybrid V6 turbocharged engine was undercooked, but after almost two weeks the situation could only be labelled critical.
McLaren-Honda completed less than half the testing distance of the next closest team to run at all three sessions – 2479 fewer kilometres, in fact – and the power unit was found to be not only down on power, but also woefully unreliable, regardless of whether we admit Fernando Alonso speculation into the discussion.
Promises of a midseason resurgence amounted to nothing. McLaren was saved the ignominy of finishing last in the championship standings only because Manor’s near-death experience over the 2014–15 off-season prevented it from building a competitive car. Jenson Button and Fernando Alonso collected six points-paying finishes between them to end the 2015 sixteenth and 17th in the drivers title.
Sponsors left the team in droves, but few new ones joined. The car in its various unimaginative liveries remained painfully bare of support. McLaren recorded a £30 million (A$59.3 million) loss in its 2015 campaign, according to Autosport’s analysis, which was the equal largest deficit along with that lodged by Williams – though while Williams is in obvious ascendancy, McLaren sits painfully close to bottom of the barrel.
Months of internal unrest strained relationships between McLaren and Jenson Button, McLaren and Fernando Alonso, and McLaren and Honda risked tearing the fledgling partnership apart. However, with the calmness of the off-season making clear that none of the aggrieved parties had any option but to regroup and try again, purpose took hold at Woking.
Fast-forward almost 12 months and McLaren-Honda once again stands on the precipice of a great unknown. Overnight the MP4-31 broke cover on the opening day of 2016 pre-season testing with Jenson Button at the wheel – but riding with him was not only the burden of a season’s worth of disappointment, but also the pressure of critical expectation.
Put simply, McLaren-Honda cannot afford another season like 2015. It cannot afford it literally – the long-term finances of an unsuccessful McLaren Formula One team would put immense pressure on the McLaren Group – nor can the image of either company sustain the battering that comes with finishing at the bottom of the world championship table.
Consider this thought experiment. McLaren, the team with a 23.2 per cent Formula One winning ratio and which has fielded an entry in every season since 1966, cannot be considered a front-running team. If the outcome of its off-season recovery efforts is anything less than stellar, it could scarcely be considered a midfield team. Formula One’s second-oldest team would be labelled a paid-up member of the backmarker club.
Consider also that, barring its temporary dalliance with team ownership in the mid-2000s, the capital Honda has in Formula One, built with four championships over five seasons between 1988 and 1992, would be completely burnt if it fails to bring a vaguely competitive power unit to the table. ‘McLaren-Honda’ would cease to be synonymous with Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost’s domination of the sport and instead be connotative of under-delivery and dysfunction.
Even Ron Dennis, who architected his own way back into power from the non-executive chairman position in January 2014, will be tarred by his inability to deliver on his promise to return McLaren to its former glory.
The worst-case scenario? A humiliating backdown from Ron Dennis’s non-negotiable position that only works teams can win titles. Honda withdraws quietly to Japan. Fernando Alonso retires without his third title. Jenson Button becomes a marathon runner.
Eric Boullier leaves Formula One for a calmer life as a civic transport director. The team misses the boat to jump their rivals when the next regulatory cycle starts in 2017.
In short, an entire McLaren generation is obliterated from the record books. The rekindling of history is relabelled as little more than an ill-conceived science experiment. The team makes its new home in the wilderness.
There’s a lot more riding on McLaren-Honda’s pre-season than gathering tyre and aero data. For this once-famous Formula One brand, these previous eight days could be everything.
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