Why McLaren's new star has looked second rate

Stoffel Vandoorne's promotion to a full-time race seat in Formula 1 was meant to be a seminal moment for the McLaren-Honda team. McLaren considers Vandoorne to be the real deal - a young superstar around which the squad can shape its long-term future.

Vandoorne is meant to be McLaren's answer to Max Verstappen, one of an elite breed of junior single-seater stars of recent seasons - alongside Mercedes proteges Pascal Wehrlein and Esteban Ocon, and Ferrari hopefuls Antonio Giovinazzi and Charles Leclerc - considered to have the potential to dazzle in F1 if given sufficient opportunity.

McLaren handed Vandoorne that opportunity after a superb record of success in the junior formulas, including Formula Renault 2.0 and GP2 titles.

Vandoorne has won races at every level in which he's raced - including Japanese Super Formula. He scored a point in a stunning grand prix debut deputising for Fernando Alonso in Bahrain last year too, and became such hot property that McLaren had to find him a race seat in F1 this year or risk losing him to a rival.

Great things are expected of McLaren's prodigy, but so far his first full season in F1 hasn't gone to plan.

Vandoorne failed to escape Q1 in any of the first five races, while team-mate Alonso made Q2 at the first four and qualified inside the top seven for his home grand prix in Spain.

The average gap between them in qualifying is 0.601s, which equates to a percentage deficit of 0.672% against Vandoorne. That puts him in the bottom three of 2017 performers when measured against their team-mates - ahead of only Williams rookie Lance Stroll (who is 1% down against Felipe Massa) and Jolyon Palmer (who is 1.451% down on Renault team-mate Nico Hulkenberg).

The races have been largely disappointing as well - last of the classified finishers in Australia; only just ahead of the Saubers in Russia; a silly incident with Massa in Spain (for which Vandoorne received a grid penalty) and another crash in Monaco.

While it's true Vandoorne has been a victim of McLaren-Honda's torrid reliability record since pre-season testing at Barcelona - causing him to retire in China and fail to even start the race in Bahrain - and that Honda's continuing difficulties extracting decent performance from the engine have made his life harder still, that doesn't fully explain why Alonso has demolished Vandoorne so far.

Things have been going so badly that Vandoorne was summoned to McLaren HQ in Woking ahead of the recent Monaco GP for crunch talks on how to reverse his disappointing run of form.

McLaren says Vandoorne has been struggling to adapt to the greater technological demands of F1 compared with the single-make junior formulas he grew up in. Over the first five races Vandoorne wasn't able to find a set-up direction with the MCL32 that suited his driving style, and as a consequence he was way off Alonso's pace.

"When you come from these kinds of [junior] categories, it's the same car for everybody, so you have a driving style you have developed around this car to drive them," explains McLaren racing director Eric Boullier.

"Formula 1 is different - every weekend we bring a new front wing, new bodywork, a new rear wing, a new floor, so the car balance is very different. So when you have been told during your young career to drive the car one way, in Formula 1 you have to be a bit more flexible.

"This is only experience. He is learning, the team has to move chassis-wise, set-up-wise to go [more] to his natural driving style - because every driver has a natural style - and at the same time he is moving out of that, trying to drive differently.

"What was important was for him to pass this information to his engineering group. Then you have to fix the engineering with the rest of the company.

"The car is designed a certain way, so for us it's how we can influence the design to go a little bit the way Stoffel wants. Then we can make another step with the set-up, but you cannot change the complete car philosophy.

"On the other hand, we need Stoffel to understand and move along that path. You meet in the middle and try to make it work."

Vandoorne has also had to cope with the formidable presence of Alonso on the other side of the McLaren garage. That's not easy for any driver, but arguably it's even harder for a rookie who idolised Alonso growing up, watching him win world championships for Renault and dethrone the legend that is Michael Schumacher in the process.

"When Stoffel started racing Fernando was double world champion, so when your ambition is to be one day in Formula 1 and that day arrives, and your team-mate is the guy you were watching on TV 10 years ago, it must be a little bit overwhelming," Boullier explains.

"You're sitting in front of him in the debriefs and the guy is saying: 'the car is oversteering' and you think 'ah, well, I have understeer', and you may question yourself if you're thinking 'this guy is my reference point and is saying the opposite, I need to rethink my car'.

"This slows down the process. I think now it's fine. We discussed this and all has been cleared."

Confidence and assertiveness are very important in Formula 1, and it's common to see rookie drivers get browbeaten by team personnel with more experience, struggling to make their own voices heard and communicate exactly what they need from a car in order to go fast.

Equally, experienced engineers often underestimate the fallibility of human drivers, over-engineering the cars to a point where it can be impossible for some drivers to extract performance from them.

They will argue the driver should simply adapt - and the very best ones usually can - but you can often find that sacrificing 1% of performance from the car in a certain area to which a driver is particularly sensitive might allow that driver to extract 3% more from their car overall, which constitutes a net gain.

McLaren ran a simulation programme for Vandoorne after the Spanish Grand Prix, in which it deliberately sacrificed a tenth of performance on the car. He lapped 0.35s quicker than before, simply because he felt more comfortable.

"It's funny because the engineers say 'ah, but Lewis [Hamilton] stepped in and [straightaway] started to win'," adds Boullier. "But he did 30,000 miles of testing! They just forget this - they forget how different it is from the junior categories.

"Jumping now from a Formula Renault to F2 is exactly same, except you have more grip and more power. But from F2 to Formula 1 there is the differential, the aero, the brakes, braking by wire, engine braking - it's completely different.

"This guy is just seven races in, and he was not helped by the fact that the first three races he had problems in every session, nearly every run.

"You can see also Stoffel is somebody who is very quiet, very reserved, so I think he needed to have this possibility to talk. And I think he's getting his confidence from the fact he can [now] find a way to share what he wants."

Vandoorne arrived in Monaco for the most recent race in a much better frame of mind, admitting he had not felt "100% confident with the car" over the first five races and had taken some time to "get to grips" with the people around him.

He felt sure Monaco would turn out to be a much stronger weekend and so it proved, despite the ultimate result. He built up speed carefully on his first visit to Monte Carlo in an F1 car and was impressively fast in qualifying, making Q3 for the first time.

OK, there were two unfortunate crashes. He shunted at the end of Q2 when he clipped the inside barrier at the second part of the Swimming Pool complex - something that Verstappen knows from experience is "very easy" to do - and a first point of the season for McLaren was lost in the race when Sergio Perez dived inside at Sainte Devote after the safety car restart and Vandoorne, with cold tyres and brakes and nowhere to go on the outside line, understeered into the wall.

But the important thing is the pure performance was there. That's what McLaren hoped to see at last from a driver it has invested so much in already, and wants to keep investing in for the future. In Monaco, Vandoorne was "back to the Stoffel I know", according to Boullier.

On F1's trickiest track, Vandoorne showed some genuine signs of life after a deeply disappointing run of underperformance. Now he must produce consistently - the speed must remain, he must add results, and he must cut out the incidents.

And he must maintain his mojo when Alonso returns to the other side of the McLaren garage. That is a very different challenge to taking on Jenson Button, who - world champion though he is - hadn't driven an F1 car since November yet wasn't far off Vandoorne's pace during a one-off drive in Monaco.

But Vandoorne nevertheless at last looked more like the driver F1 expects him to be. Now we wait to see whether the same Vandoorne - the superstar McLaren is convinced he is - turns up again in Canada, or whether Alonso will continue making him look distinctly second-rate.