Charting McLaren-Honda's travails as they arrive at Silverstone
Wednesday 8 July 2015 11:41, UK
"Neither Honda nor ourselves expected the challenge to be quite as difficult as it has been," admitted McLaren chairman Ron Dennis to The Independent this week ahead of the team’s search for some timely home comforts at the British Grand Prix.
Heading to Silverstone in an all-but unprecedented ninth place in the Constructors' Championship with just one points-scoring result to their name so far, McLaren-Honda's widely-anticipated winter reunion has been dogged by unreliability and underperformance from almost the moment the MP4-30 took to the track for the first time at Jerez at the start of February.
So, with nearly half of the 2015 campaign completed, we chart their painful travails so far…
Grid: 16th and 17th; Race: 11th and DNS
Championship: 8th, 0 points
Fastest 2014 lap time: 1:30.510 (P2); Fastest 2015 time: 1:31.387 (P2) +0.877 seconds
While McLaren's troubled first winter back in tandem with Honda had suggested they were in for a tough start to the new season, few truly expected the team to be propping up the grid at the first race. With the revived Manor team in Melbourne but not appearing on the track at any stage of the weekend, it was the eight-time constructors' champions who suffered the ignominy of qualifying last for the first time in living memory.
In order to simply get through the sessions in the warm conditions of Albert Park, Honda had to run their power unit "very conservatively" and, as a result, Jenson Button and Kevin Magnussen, who was filling in for the convalescing Fernando Alonso following the Spaniard's mysterious Barcelona testing crash three weeks before, consistently ran over three seconds off Mercedes' leading pace. The softly-softly approach, however didn't stop them losing Magnussen's car on the way to the grid on Sunday, the Dane rendered a mere spectator for the season-opener. Only 11 cars ultimately saw the chequered flag, but the fact that it was still Button who finished last – two laps down and the only driver out of the points – served to underline the massive challenge ahead for McLaren and Honda.
Grid: 17th and 18th; Race: DNF and DNF
Championship: 9th, 0 points
Fastest 2014 lap time: 1:40.628 (P2); Fastest 2015 time: 1:41.635 (Q1) +1.007 seconds
On paper, McLaren's Malaysia weekend was even worse than Australia as their cars qualified ahead of only returning Manor and both dropped out well before the chequered flag. The disappointment of a second point-less race, however, was tempered by the fact that the MP4-30 did make real-time gains on the stopwatch. Having missed Q1 by 1.4 seconds in Melbourne, the gap was down to eight tenths of a second at race two, while the deficit to the front was cut to less than four seconds.
The further positive news came from the fact that Alonso was declared fit to return a month on from his still-unexplained testing crash. While the Spaniard's appearance in the Thursday press conference served to ratchet up the scrutiny on McLaren as he contradicted much of their official version of events surrounding his accident, on the track Alonso made a seamless return to action and was running in the points positions before his Honda power unit gave up early in the race.
Grid: 17th and 18th; Race: 12th and 14th
Championship: 9th, 0 points
Fastest 2014 lap time: 1:39.491 (P2); Fastest 2015 time: 1:39.275 (P2) -0.216 seconds
McLaren's worst start to a season since 1981 was confirmed at the Shanghai International Circuit, with the weekend providing a case study in fluctuating expectations. Although the team had already played down their chances of matching their progress between Australia and Malaysia even before arriving at the power-hungry circuit, the MP4-30's surprise top-12 positions during practice left Button and Alonso optimistic that Q2 could be reached for the first time.
Alas, it was the ninth row of the grid again after qualifying, although McLaren this time at least had the deficit to the Q1 cut line down to just two tenths of a second. The drivers raced resolutely from there and both made the chequered flag for the first time, although Button was handed a time penalty after a rare misjudgement in racing combat resulted in him clouting Pastor Maldonado's Lotus at Turn One. Flashes of promise were seen from Alonso, who ran an impressive long stint on soft tyres, but his 12th-place finish couldn't cloud reality: a breakthrough points finish remained quite some distance away.
Grid: 14th and 20th; Race: 11th and DNS
Championship: 9th, 0 points
Fastest 2014 lap time: 1:34.387 (Q3); Fastest 2015 time: 1:35.039 (Q2) +0.652 seconds
Bahrain proved a curate's egg of a weekend for McLaren. For the first time, courtesy of Alonso, the MP4-30 made Q2 in qualifying following surprisingly encouraging form in practice given the short five-day turnaround from China. Fourteenth on the grid then provided the platform for the Spaniard to gain three places in the race, with a first points finish of 2015 only eluding the team by four seconds at the chequered flag. Progress had certainly been made.
However, underlining that the unreliability of winter testing and the early races had yet to be eradicated, Button experienced a completely forgettable weekend in the other car. Two car breakdowns in practice – the first in P1 coming on his opening flying lap – was followed by another right at the start of qualifying which consigned the Briton to last place on the grid. As it happened, the former world champion couldn’t even take up his row-10 slot on Sunday owing to lingering electrical problems in the Honda power unit. He barely completed 30 laps all weekend.
Grid: 13th and 14th; Race: 16th and DNF
Championship: 9th, 0 points
Fastest 2014 lap time: 1:27.335 (Q3); Fastest 2015 time: 1:27.760 (Q2) +0.425 seconds
McLaren’s incremental progress continued at the opening leg of the European season, although a points finish remained elusive. For the first time, both Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button cleared the Q1 hurdle in qualifying, with the gap to Q3 coming down to below one second.
Debuting the MP4-30’s new graphite look, Honda hoped to have solved some of their early woes via a reliability upgrade to their power unit, while the car itself featured a raft of aerodynamic revisions. The race proved a disappointment though as Alonso, who reckoned he was on course for ninth, retired with a brake failure and Button described the car post-race as “pretty scary to drive”.
Grid: 10th and 13th; Race: 8th and DNF
Championship: 9th, 4 points
Fastest 2014 lap time: 1:17.555 (Q3); Fastest 2015 time: 1:17.093 (Q2) -0.462 seconds
At the sixth time of asking, McLaren and Honda scored their first points as a partnership since the 1992 Australian GP as the tight and twisty confines of the principality took the pressure off the Japanese manufacturer’s fragile engine. Button’s eighth-place finish came at the end of a relatively trouble-free weekend with his car, with the Briton only missing out on Q3 as he had to slow for yellow flags for an incident ahead on the track.
However, it proved a completely different weekend for Alonso as a breakdown in Q2 ruined his qualifying before gearbox problems then intervened when he was racing to join his team-mate in the points on Sunday.
Grid: 13th and 20th; Race: DNF and DNF
Championship: 9th, 4 points
Fastest 2014 lap time: 1:16.182 (Q3); Fastest 2015 time: 1:16.276 (Q2) +0.094 seconds
Honda may have opted to spend two of their remaining engine development tokens ahead of F1’s 2015’s first trip across the Atlantic, but McLaren were already playing down their chances of a strong result around the power-dependent Circuit Gilles Villeneuve even before they arrived in Montreal. Sadly for the team, their gloomy predictions proved to be wholly correct.
Having already had to perform an engine change on Alonso’s car before P3, Button’s MP4-30 then broke down in final practice. To make matters worse, not only was the Briton forced to miss qualifying, he picked up a 15-place grid drop for exceeding his penalty-free limit on two separate areas of the power unit. Already at the back of the pack, a drive-through penalty early in the race was then applied. In truth, it mattered little: both Button and Alonso, who had dropped back after a positive start to the race from 13th, retired with exhaust problems with 20 laps of the race to run. A forgettable weekend all round.
Grid: 19th and 20th; Race: DNF and DNF
Championship: 9th, 4 points
Fastest 2014 lap time: 1:09.473 (Q2); Fastest 2015 time: 1:10.736 (Q2) +1.263 seconds
But if Canada was forgettable, Austria was even worse. A combined 50-place grid penalty, a second successive double retirement and a heavy lap-one race crash which broke many of the car’s new parts – McLaren’s 2015 season plunged to new depths in the hills of Austria. Expecting another tough weekend on track, the team opted to accelerate engine change penalties that had long become inevitable with both cars and therefore compromised their chances of gaining even a modesty respectable result at the Red Bull Ring.
With Alonso, who was running a new shorter nose on his car, and Button qualifying only 15th and 17th respectively anyway, both drivers were forced to carry part of their grid penalties into the race – although the Spaniard didn’t even get as far as Turn Three after being collected by an out-of-control Kimi Raikkonen. Button served his stop-and-go penalty, but didn’t get much further before yet more electrical gremlins intervened. At least Silverstone can't - surely - get any worse.
