McLaren-Honda has no excuses

It's getting perilously close to the start of the season for McLaren-Honda, and things haven't gone well in testing so far.

Mercedes showed what was possible for a first attempt at the Formula 1 V6 turbos last year, and by that comparison Honda should be doing much better.

Remember, Honda had a season of being able to see how other people went about things and will have had some insight from McLaren on how Mercedes operated its engine.

It's not as if Honda suddenly decided halfway through last year to build an F1 power unit; this has been on the cards for a long time.

Alonso's crash ended a tough week for McLaren © XPB

Honda sees F1 as a great challenge for its engineers. Regardless of whether or not it has been competing in any given period, it has always followed grand prix racing very closely.

When the new regulations were being discussed four or five years ago, Honda will have known about it and had a bunch of engineers playing around with concepts and designs to try to understand the challenges. So it's not exactly new to Honda.

That's just one of the reasons why I think it should be doing a better job. The fact is a lot of work will have been done on the dyno. They will be using a transient dyno that really puts the power unit package through its paces, which is something Mercedes did superbly heading into last year.

The running at the circuit in pre-season testing should be about exploring the final five per cent of the package in real-world conditions.

Take the MGU-K seal that failed during the recent Barcelona test. That's something you must discover on the dyno, not at the track. This preparatory testing is all about proving the fundamentals of whether such kit works, so I don't understand what's gone wrong there.

A team like McLaren will have a remarkable selection of test gear, such as gearbox dynos and rigs that put loads through the suspension. The days when you arrived at the circuit having stuck your finger in the air, tested the wind and went in with a best guess have long gone.

So why is Honda struggling? Is it because it doesn't have the sophisticated test facilities that current F1 requires?

There will always be glitches; that's unavoidable no matter how much dyno work you do. But what Honda has suffered should not happen. The functionality of an F1 car, including things like the gearbox and gearshift, should be a given. At the track, you are refining it.

Neither driver managed to get out of the pits for long © XPB

This is why I am so surprised at the problems McLaren and Honda have been facing. You could argue that with just one team, difficulties were inevitable, but I would go the other way and say that with the available technology, many of these problems are avoidable, unless somewhere along the line you are not using the facilities to the maximum.

Given what's happened, it would be a surprise if there aren't more problems lurking. Every time the car leaves the garage, I imagine the team has no idea what's going to go wrong next.

And that's particularly problematic because the enormous complexity of these hybrid engines means that every time you try to extract that extra fraction of performance, you will encounter new difficulties because you're changing the loads going through everything. McLaren is not getting the chance to work through all this.

Both team and engine supplier have been upbeat about this project and the level that it should be able to start at. But it's not 1988 anymore - this is a completely different world.

I'm also concerned about some of the things the team is saying. I'd much rather there was evidence of some willingness to bash heads together and try to get something done, instead of trying to put a brave face on it. It seems that everyone is happy.

McLaren wants to be able to do 100 laps in a day, park the car in the garage, give it a polish and be ready to start again first thing the next morning. But this isn't happening. I just don't believe this stuff about expecting problems.

Alonso has tried to put a brave face on McLaren's winter © LAT

Take Fernando Alonso's crash. A statement was released saying that there was no change in the aerodynamic loads on the car, it was because of a gust of wind. But wind changes the aerodynamic loads - that's why the driver has to deal with sudden understeer or oversteer and all of a sudden is in the wall.

While there's a degree of McLaren trying to clarify what happened given some of the inevitable rumours that do the rounds, it's simply not true that there was no change. Why say these things? It makes you question the mindset in the team.

Overall, the approach needs to be more aggressive. Too many times we hear statements like 'we gathered lots of data today so we are not too disappointed only to have done three laps'. It's barely worth even saying that, so somebody needs to grab the team by the throat and make it work.

It's essential to understand how you got into this situation, because there are only two-and-a-half weeks to go until the season starts in Melbourne. The clock is ticking.

It's not just about continuing to do the same thing - you have to analyse why things aren't working. If you don't identify the fundamental weakness, you'll keep going around in circles (or not, in the case of McLaren-Honda!).

McLaren is a team that I have a lot of respect for. I worked there in the 1970s and it has had a huge amount of success. But look at what's happened in recent years.

A 1988 McLaren-Honda lurked in the garage as a reminder of historic success © LAT

When the regulations changed in 2009, it had trouble with the new aerodynamic rules. And there were a lot of excuses in the years that followed. Former team principal Martin Whitmarsh paid the price, but there still seems to be a problem.

I am blaming a lot of this on McLaren, rather than just Honda. And that's because this is a partnership. The bottom line is that McLaren-Honda has to be able to run reliably in Melbourne in order to have a shot of getting a decent result.

But if there is still the chance that every time the car rolls out of the garage something is going to go wrong, that's going to hold it back.

Once you are into the race weekends, there's very little time to be wasted. In testing, you compile all the information you need to run the car, so ideally you know what to do when you are presented with different circumstances during the season.

That applies to set-up work too. You need to identify and understand how the car reacts to set-up changes, but right now McLaren will not have that data.

This makes the final four-day test in Spain that starts on Thursday vitally important. Another test spent not doing the miles because of problems will mean McLaren and Honda start the season firmly on the back foot.

And it's a long way back from that kind of situation given the strides being made by the likes of Ferrari, Red Bull, Williams and Mercedes.