How McLaren-Honda was torn apart

Anyone who's followed Formula 1 closely over the past three years will say this outcome was only a matter of time, but now, finally, after nearly three seasons of woeful underachievement, the second coming of the McLaren-Honda alliance has been dissolved.

Yesterday's news follows a series of frantic meetings between McLaren and Honda bosses during the recent Italian Grand Prix weekend, as McLaren served notice to Honda that it intended to walk away from the multi-year works engine partnership that began in earnest in 2015.

It wasn't meant to end this way. McLaren-Honda was meant to rule the world. "Domination", in the manner the previous incarnation of this alliance achieved in the late-1980s, is what Ron Dennis set as the target.

But the best McLaren-Honda managed this time around was merely derision, as it singularly failed to achieve anything approaching its lofty ambition. The decision for McLaren and Honda to finally go their separate ways follows a sustained, some might say endemic, period of underachievement that has tested McLaren's patience beyond breaking point.

Relations were highly strained during the first season of the reformed partnership, but became much better last season, as Honda showed a firmer grasp of the complex hybrid power loop that defines the potency of F1's current breed of V6 turbo engine, helping McLaren climb from ninth to sixth in the constructors' championship.

Meanwhile, McLaren had undergone a serious overhaul of its technical structure, including re-hiring Peter Prodromou from Red Bull. The aim was to improve McLaren's car design processes and rate of development, in readiness for a championship challenge once the Honda engine came good.

The minimum aim this year - not firmly stated publicly but admitted privately - was to finish inside the top four at least. In fact, McLaren chief operating officer Jonathan Neale said the team would be "disappointed" to finish fourth.

McLaren felt the MCL32 produced by its revised technical team would maximize the potential of this season's new and enhanced aerodynamic regulations. This, coupled with a redesigned Honda engine concept - lighter and lower than its predecessor - was meant to allow McLaren to leapfrog the midfield and carry the fight to Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull.

But pre-season testing revealed serious shortcomings. The Honda engine was leaky, unreliable, and less powerful than the old design. It also shook uncontrollably, as the transmission produced terrible vibrations that weren't predicted during winter testing on Honda's Sakura dyno.

McLaren's pre-season preparations were thoroughly ruined as the team struggled to turn laps during two weeks of winter testing, its rivals gaining an advantage with every frustrating minute that passed without McLaren on the track.

Star driver Fernando Alonso was furious; the whole McLaren team was furious. This was setting the team up for a worse season that its annus horribilis of 2015, but without the genuine excuses of a manufacturer then-new into the V6 game.

It was nothing short of a crisis. Moves began behind the scenes to terminate the partnership and seek a return to the Mercedes customer engine fold. Ironic when you consider a major part of McLaren's rationale for partnering with Honda was a belief it couldn't win the world championship as a customer team in the hybrid era.

Nevertheless, the McLaren board figured it could lean on past ties to secure a supply, perhaps even as early as in-season. The Mercedes board was supposedly happy to help McLaren out - they go way back after all - the Mercedes F1 team less so.

But first McLaren faced a tricky conundrum - how to extricate itself from a works partnership with Honda that also commercially puts significant funding into McLaren's budget?

McLaren initially tried to repair the damage by brokering an arrangement for Honda to work with Mercedes on a consultancy basis, by which Mercedes agreed to provide advice on component supply chain and other technical matters.

News of this potential partnership broke during the Russian Grand Prix weekend, but apparently hit the skids amid Honda's understandable reluctance to reveal the inner workings of its power unit design to a rival. McLaren was initially furious, but eventually conceded this would have been an untenable situation for Honda.

Honda "failed" in its task to match the estimated Mercedes customer engine output by Spa. It opened the door for separation and severance

So, it was left to Honda to clean up its own mess. The Japanese manufacturer had already begun work on fixing its own shortcomings, bringing in Ilmor - the organisation drafted in by Renault during its own period of early struggle with this formula in 2015 - around the time of April's Chinese Grand Prix.

Honda managed to fix a few of its pre-season problems, but it still suffered a serious lack of power and continued unreliability - particularly with the MGU-H - during the opening races of the campaign. To avert this growing crisis, and rescue the partnership from dissolution, McLaren demanded Honda achieve parity with the Mercedes customer engine it was seeking to obtain as an alternative.

They drew up a three-stage development plan to achieve this by an agreed deadline. The first step was scheduled for May's Spanish Grand Prix, the second for the Canadian GP in June, the third and final step - to match the estimated Mercedes customer engine output - was meant to arrive in time for August's Belgian Grand Prix.

Honda brought updates to each of these races, but they were not sufficient. As its F1 project leader Yusuke Hasegawa admitted in the FIA press conference at Spa, Honda "failed" in its task, and was now in breach of the development plan agreed with McLaren, opening the door for separation and severance.

Anticipating that Honda-Ilmor wouldn't succeed in its task, McLaren continued efforts to secure a supply of customer engines from Mercedes. The F1 team was supposedly reticent to agree to this, fearing an Alonso-driven McLaren would be a threat to its own prospects at certain tracks. Nevertheless, feeling it had the support of the Mercedes board, McLaren was confident.

Then Sauber fired team boss Monisha Kaltenborn and installed Frederic Vasseur as team principal. Kaltenborn had signed a memorandum of understanding that Honda would supply engines to Sauber for 2018 and beyond, but the proposed deal fell apart amid the growing uncertainty over McLaren's future, and whether Honda would even continue its F1 programme without McLaren.

Vasseur immediately cancelled Sauber's proposed Honda engine deal, undoing weeks of work at Hinwil that had already begun in preparation for Honda coming on board in 2018.

McLaren believes Vasseur went straight to his old friend Wolff to ask for a customer engine supply from Mercedes and was rebuffed, but supposedly Sauber never considered doing a deal with Mercedes in the first place, preferring instead to focus on renewing terms with Ferrari.

Apparently, there was not enough time to make a fresh collaboration with Mercedes work in any case, whereas renewing a pre-existing relationship with Ferrari made things easier for Sauber's 2018 preparations, given the mid-season timing of its decision to cancel the Honda deal.

Mercedes says it does not have the capacity to supply a fourth team properly anyway, having seen the 2016 title battle between Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton warped by serious reliability problems while it supplied a fourth set of engines to the now-defunct Manor team.

McLaren believed Mercedes would rather supply no fourth team at all than see a customer supply head back to McLaren, and began to suspect that even if a deal could be brokered it wouldn't receive parity with the works team on fuel supply and engine mapping.

Talks thus began with Renault around the time of July's British Grand Prix, as Ferrari and Mercedes both ruled out supplying McLaren with engines. The sticking point was that Renault also does not want to supply a fourth team, given the reliability problems it has suffered while servicing three outfits in 2017.

With Mercedes, Ferrari and Renault all locked in to supplying no more than two customers each, as well as their own works outfits, attention turned to breaking the deadlock.

Toro Rosso is a team in need of funding, while the Red Bull/Renault relationship has long been strained, following Red Bull's failed attempt to divorce Renault in 2015 and jump into bed with Mercedes.

McLaren faced three options: stick with Honda but lose Alonso; help salvage the Toro Rosso-Honda deal and take up a Renault supply; ditch Honda and convince it to leave F1 entirely

The relationship appears so broken there seems little chance of Red Bull ever returning to special customer status with Renault. Why not allow Toro Rosso to work with Honda for a year then jump in on the deal when Red Bull's own Renault contract expires? Works Hondas have potential for Red Bull in the medium term; second-rate Renaults do not, goes the theory.

The makeweight in the deal was Toro Rosso driver Carlos Sainz Jr, a longtime target of Renault. The plan was for Sainz to go to Renault to compensate Renault for releasing Toro Rosso from the final year of its engine deal, allowing Honda to strike a fresh deal with Red Bull's second team to remain in F1, while McLaren takes over the vacated Renault engine supply. Everyone goes home happy.

Renault said it was open to a partnership with McLaren on the same terms as Red Bull, and McLaren can count on the bonus of already dealing with Renault's fuel and lubricants supplier BP. McLaren also believes it can help Renault technically, having assisted development of certain elements of Honda's energy recovery systems.

What McLaren wants, that it feels it wouldn't get with Mercedes, is total parity with the works outfit - something Red Bull feels it does not receive currently, incidentally, though the French manufacturer has pledged extra support in the wake of Max Verstappen's repeated reliability problems in races this year.

McLaren believes Renault's new 2017 engine concept is capable of producing 570kW (764bhp) of power, but current reliability concerns make 20bhp of that potential inaccessible. Work is ongoing at Viry to correct this for 2018.

McLaren estimates that a fully operational Renault engine, with BP fuel and works mapping, would produce 5bhp more than a current customer Mercedes engine, which it reckons is 15kw (20bhp) down on the works engines owing to software mapping it believes Mercedes only makes available for Hamilton and team-mate Valtteri Bottas in qualifying.

Renault F1 boss Cyril Abiteboul spoke before this season about Renault's new engine concept having the potential to beat Mercedes, and it seems McLaren agrees with that assessment.

Concerns about Honda's long-term commitment to F1 in a post-McLaren world looked to have scuppered the proposed Toro Rosso deal, and therefore McLaren's hopes of a Renault engine deal, during F1's August break, so McLaren was faced with a three-way choice as F1 reconvened at Spa:

1. Stick with Honda but potentially lose Alonso, who privately told McLaren he will definitely sign a new contract once McLaren agrees an engine deal with Renault.

2. Urge further negotiation of a deal between Toro Rosso and Honda by helping convince Honda to maintain its longer-term commitment to F1, freeing up the Renault engine supply McLaren seeks.

3. Divorce Honda but convince it to quit F1 altogether as part of the severance, placing the onus on the FIA to find McLaren an alternative engine for 2018 if one of the remaining manufacturers is not forthcoming.

In the week following the Belgian Grand Prix, McLaren decided once and for all against option one and told Honda its works partnership would cease at the end of 2017, leaving Honda free to do a deal with Toro Rosso to remain in F1, or disappear completely.

Honda motorsport boss Masashi Yamamoto (pictured above, left, with Hasegawa) met with McLaren chiefs in Japan before flying into Monza for crunch talks during the Italian Grand Prix. It seems Honda still harboured hopes of convincing McLaren it has developments in place for 2018 that could convince the team to remain in alliance.

Both McLaren's commercial chief Zak Brown and Alonso suggested they'd be keen to see those plans. Hasegawa said he feared Honda wouldn't be able to convince McLaren to remain on board for next year.

The FIA and Formula 1's new owners declared themselves ready to step in to resolve matters if necessary. F1 of course wants McLaren and Alonso to be properly competitive next year, for the good of its show; the FIA wants Honda to remain on the grid for the good of the controversial engine regulations that tempted the Japanese manufacturer back in the first place.

That race finished with something akin to a Mexican stand-off between Toro Rosso/Red Bull, Honda, McLaren and Renault, with everyone waiting for someone else to pull the trigger first. News of Renault's deal to take Sainz from Toro Rosso emerged a week later, the first in a sequence of domino moves that allowed McLaren to annul its partnership with Honda.

There always seemed a fundamental mismatch in ideology between these two. Honda arrived under-prepared and never managed to make up for lost time, seemingly content to work at its own pace and use F1 as an experimental test bed for technology and engineers.

McLaren only wanted results, and wanted them yesterday, which added pressure on Honda and increased the likelihood of mistakes. Honda wanted to be better, but could never progress quickly or competently enough to satisfy McLaren's demands.

Once trust was lost, there was no real hope of reconciliation. So now, finally, after nearly three seasons of abject disappointment and underachievement, McLaren-Honda's second marriage is over.

A match made in heaven it ultimately was not. Rather a tale of great expectations that never came close to being fulfilled.