McLaren-Honda's woeful reunion

This was unquestionably a terrible season for McLaren. For a team of its status, resources and technical might - and given the fact it possesses two world champion drivers - to finish ninth in the world championship was a woeful underachievement.

McLaren knew it would be in for a tough time this year, the first in its renewed works engine partnership with Honda, but it still reckoned improvement would come fast enough to at least match its fifth-place finish in the 2014 constructors' standings.

As it was, McLaren-Honda fell well short of that. No wins, no podiums, just 27 points scored between both drivers, and not once did one of the Woking team's cars qualify inside the top 10 for a grand prix. McLaren's worst season ever? Arguably yes. It finished ninth in 1980 too, but at least tied on points with the two teams above it...

But however much F1 fans might have hoped for an instantaneously glorious comeback, Honda's return to Formula 1 was never really about 2015. This is about playing the long game - taking some serious pain in the short term in order to reap the long-term benefit of world championship success.

Things were tough from the off with the first test in November 2014 © XPB

Objectively speaking, McLaren ditched a customer supply of the best engine in F1 (Mercedes) in order to use comfortably the worst on an exclusive basis. But the team had grown frustrated by customer status, particularly with regard to the fact it has a technical tie-up with fuel company Mobil, while the Mercedes V6 is optimised around Petronas fuels and lubricants.

McLaren felt it couldn't compete with the might of the works Mercedes team while using a 'second rate' version of its engine, so it decided it had to become a works team in order to compete for the world championship again.

That's where Honda came in. Trouble is, Honda faced the dual challenge of a late start with the new V6 technology compared to its rivals, plus building up an F1 operation from scratch and learning how the game works again, having been out of the category completely since it pulled the plug on its last in-house works team in 2008 - all while attempting to innovate in order to outwit the opposition.

The scale of the mountain Honda has to climb was apparent from the first test of its V6 hybrid turbo in Abu Dhabi in November 2014. McLaren junior Stoffel Vandoorne completed just five laps across two days as the Honda engine suffered persistent electrical problems while running in the back of a McLaren test hack.

There was a degree of improvement in pre-season testing this year, but the 'size zero' MP4-30 (so-called in reference to the particularly tight aerodynamic packaging at the rear of the car) was still woefully unreliable, and woefully off the pace.

Here Honda began learning the difficulties of getting the complicated hybrid systems to work correctly. A shaft within the MGU-K component of the energy recovery system repeatedly failed, and eventually McLaren had to step in, calling on its experience with KERS under previous rules to help Honda create a fix.

Honda also struggled to cool the engine under such tight bodywork. The engines were detuned for the first race in Australia, where Jenson Button finished a twice-lapped 11th and team-mate Kevin Magnussen (standing in for the concussed Fernando Alonso) failed to even start after his engine stopped on the way to the grid.

There were further heat-related retirements in Malaysia, where Alonso returned to action after his mysterious testing crash, and Button suffered a sequence of electrical component failures that prevented him participating in qualifying for round four in Bahrain - plus further ERS woe that kept him off the grid for the race as well.

The lack of consistent running over the early portion of the campaign meant the MP4-30 chassis couldn't be developed or set up as quickly as hoped, but by mid-season there was at least significant progress in reliability terms.

Some operational errors remained, such as the failure to correctly attach a pipe to Button's engine during practice in Monza, but - the higher-altitude races in Mexico and Brazil aside - the power units stopped going bang or shutting down unexpectedly with such regularity.

McLaren drivers struggled for laps during much of the 2015 campaign © LAT

Attention therefore turned to the persistent underlying lack of performance. This was exposed brutally at Spa in August, where Honda introduced its 'phase-three' combustion engine upgrade, but both cars struggled to out-pace any rivals except the Manor Marussias.

Honda's chief weakness turned out to be a lack of efficiency in some aspects of the ERS, particularly the turbine, compressor and MGU-H, which work in tandem to convert waste elements of the combustion process into electrical energy, which can then be used to support the MGU-K in giving an estimated 120kw (160bhp) power boost to the engine via a battery.

This inefficiency was partly due to weaknesses in Honda's components, and partly due to the requirement to reduce the size and capacity of these components for the benefit of the 'size zero' aerodynamic philosophy.

The problems were particularly apparent on the long straights of Spa and Monza, where both drivers felt as though they were "sitting ducks" (as Button put it).

Honda knows what it needs to do to fix the problem, but questions remain within the alliance about its capability to effect those changes in time for the start of the 2016 campaign. This has caused tensions between the two organisations at times, as McLaren's race team naturally demands faster progress than Honda is able to manage.

McLaren has also suffered commercial damage (estimated at roughly £20 million) from these ongoing poor results, both in terms of losing prize money for finishing lower in the constructors' table than expected and also sponsorship.

"It was a wake up call; the toughest ever I guess," is McLaren racing director Eric Boullier's assessment of this campaign. "McLaren was also restructuring itself: a new process, new people, new way of working, new philosophy, huge changes, Honda joining.

"You expect some reliability issues and not to be performing as good as you should, but definitely not expecting to be that far [off]. You always draft a realistic plan and a less realistic plan, and unfortunately we stuck to the realistic one."

Nevertheless, there were "bright spots" in performance after the 'phase-four' internal combustion engine was introduced during practice for October's Russian GP, then fitted for its race debut in the following event in the United States.

Having been spun to the back of the field by a touch from Felipe Massa's Williams at the first corner, Alonso raced into the top five (with no small amount of help from some well-timed safety cars, admittedly), and McLaren almost scored a double points finish. More significantly, it raced competitively against other midfield cars, even with a lower specification of engine in the back of Button's car.

Alonso and Boullier occasionally found reasons to smile off-track © LAT

The high altitude of the next two races in Mexico and Brazil again exposed McLaren-Honda's deficit in terms of energy recovery and turbo performance (the turbo has to work harder for the engine to produce equivalent power in thinner air), but rivals began to notice how good the MP4-30 looked on the twistier bits of the late-season circuits.

In fact, decent and continuous chassis development was arguably the biggest success of an otherwise terrible season for McLaren-Honda. The restructuring of the aerodynamic department, undertaken since Boullier joined the team at the end of 2013, has got McLaren back on track in terms of conceiving a car that can be improved properly throughout a campaign, which could not be said of the overly-aggressive design of '13 and the overly-conservative effort of last year.

Under the influence of engineering chief Peter Prodromou, who returned to Woking last September after a stint at Red Bull, McLaren is now pursuing usable and consistent downforce, rather than peak figures, which is making its car more driveable. Both drivers were quite complimentary of the chassis performance and its development come the closing stages of the campaign.

But McLaren's aim is to build the best car on the grid, not what it estimates was arguably the third best chassis by the end of this year, so the team admits there is still work to do on that side. But the big question remains whether Honda can dig the alliance out of the big ERS-shaped black hole that sucked the life out of McLaren's competitive vitality during their first season back together since 1992.

"In the situation we are in now we expected some tensions, but it's fine as long as it was constructive tension," says Boullier. "Honda are quite mature about this. It's true there were differences between both companies, and also there were different approaches. Now we know how it works on both sides.

"We definitely know what we need to do and where we have to be. The path is very clear. Maybe it's a bad for a good. It was very, very bad [this year], so hopefully it'll be very, very good [in the future]."

It will need to be much, much better if Alonso and Button are to rejoin the big boys at the front of the grid, in which case McLaren's decision to ditch Mercedes customer status for works Honda power will look like a masterstroke.

If not, it could turn out to be the biggest mistake in the team's long and illustrious history. 2016 could turn out to be pivotal in the timeline of the house that Bruce McLaren built...

ALONSO AND MCLAREN REUNITED

When Fernando Alonso fell out with McLaren at the end of 2007 and left to rejoin Renault, most people thought he would never return.

But he has, lured away from Ferrari by Honda's millions and the promise that McLaren is putting in place plans to topple the mighty Mercedes juggernaut, which would give Alonso the chance to win the third world title he so desperately craves before he retires.

Things started badly, with Alonso suffering concussion during the second pre-season test at Barcelona, where he crashed exiting Turn 3 in circumstances that are not fully understood.

This caused him to skip the first race in Australia, but he returned for round two in Malaysia showing no ill effects, and continued to demonstrate no real ill will towards his 'new' team, despite the lack of results.

True there were occasional radio outbursts about Honda's "GP2 engine" and rumours he may take a sabbatical in 2016 if McLaren-Honda is not competitive, while Alonso himself admitted he drove in "economy mode" this year because of the lack of performance in the package. But in terms of working with this team again, things couldn't have gone much better.

"The team is much more open now and much more international," he says. "In 2007 it had been the same people for many years. It was a little bit different. The team now is very happy and relaxed. Despite the results we are very united, and the team is very positive."

According to Boullier, some of the intrinsic difficulties of 2007 that led to a breakdown in relations between team and driver have now dissipated.

"I think the problem was mainly a product of the house - Lewis [Hamilton] was naturally the favourite of the home, because he is British, he grew up in McLaren, and you can't do anything against this," Boullier explains. "The entourage of Fernando should have warned him about this.

"The difference [now] is that he's seven years older, and I think McLaren is maybe listening to him a little bit more. But I don't want to go into this, because it would not be fair to criticise the past."

Things may well be very different now, but chances are the end result will be similar if McLaren-Honda cannot get its competitive act together quickly. Alonso is 34 now, so time is of the essence.