The hubris that's slowly killing McLaren and Red Bull

For those who believe in Karma, the next 12 months in Formula 1 should make for fascinating viewing. McLaren and Red Bull both face a reckoning in 2018 that could have serious ramifications for their respective futures, and their respective reputations as two of grand prix racing's powerhouse teams.

Those reputations are hard won and easily lost. McLaren's has been slowly eroded by almost five full seasons of chronic underachievement, while Red Bull has gradually lost the aura of dominance it enjoyed in the latter part of F1's V8 era, before V6 hybrid turbos ruined everything.

Now the fates of these two proud and successful entities are intertwined - united by their mutual dissatisfaction with their present engine partners. They both put such a brave face on things to begin with, until slowly but surely the vitriol spilled forth into the public domain. Both said it wouldn't, until frustrated competitive instinct took over.

Now, both must surely depend on the F1 engine equivalent of Wife Swap to dig themselves out of trouble. McLaren has availed on Renault to rescue it from a Honda-shaped hole; Red Bull has lived through almost four seasons of Renault strife and may soon rely on Honda to be its saviour.

In many ways both these teams are victims of their own success. Both know what it is to utterly dominate Formula 1, but such impressive achievement so often breeds hubris.

McLaren and Red Bull both believe they belong at the front of the grid - that it is their right to be there. Partly, that is necessary self-belief in a world where winning is everything. It is not totally without foundation either. But unerring self-confidence has its downsides.

When things started to go badly wrong, both felt they could demand the best engine in F1 and get it with no questions asked. Both were ultimately denied. Now, it increasingly looks as though they must feed off one another's scraps to get by until new regulations present opportunity for the balance of power to shift away from Mercedes.

How the mighty have fallen. But you make your bed and you lie in it, so the saying goes. Red Bull trashed Renault repeatedly during its darkest days, quickly lost faith in the French manufacturer, made threats to quit the championship if a competitive engine wasn't forthcoming, made overtures to Mercedes, got blocked, and was then forced back to Renault, cap in hand, to renew its existing engine deal on worse commercial terms.

People have long memories when it suits them. Why would Renault really want to lift a finger for Red Bull - especially with its own works project to focus on? Of course it will say all the right things in public, fulfil the terms of the contract, offer a bit of extra support when something goes wrong. But there is a difference between being professional and going the extra mile. And let's face it, running a marathon is tougher if your heart's not in it.

Of course, it's not quite so simple as all that. Renault made commitments to Red Bull that were not met, so Red Bull felt within its rights to kick up a fuss. But the way it did this created a lot of damage that arguably can't ever be properly repaired.

The relationship appears broken; the necessary trust is no longer there. Red Bull's status as a preferred customer certainly looks diminished. Now Renault has a new customer on the horizon, so it's no real surprise to hear suggestions it wants to cease working with Red Bull when the current contract between them expires at the end of 2018.

McLaren and Honda were supposed to dominate in F1, but all they produced was three years of miserable underachievement

Regardless of any Bernie Ecclestone-engineered obligation to supply Red Bull on Renault's part, lack of will should be enough to send Red Bull elsewhere. Why stay where you are not wanted?

That's where McLaren comes in - the team that gave up a customer supply of the best V6 engines in Formula 1 to become works partner to a different engine manufacturer that hadn't been properly successful in F1 for the best part of 25 years, and which has now given up on that project too.

McLaren and Honda were going to win... no... 'dominate' together, but in actual fact they simply produced three years of miserable underachievement. McLaren insisted it wouldn't turn against Honda in the way Red Bull turned on Renault - there were a hundred million reasons not to of course - but eventually McLaren did turn on Honda, felt similarly confident it could get back into bed with Mercedes, got spurned, and out of desperation has now struck up a new relationship with Red Bull's old flame. What happened to "it's impossible for a customer team to become world champion"?

The most telling indicator of how far McLaren has fallen is that it would have been happy to stick with Honda, if only the Japanese manufacturer could have developed this year's engine to parity with the Mercedes customer unit McLaren spurned to join forces with Honda in the first place. Never mind the original plan to produce a more powerful engine than Mercedes could...

The attraction of Renault is simply that it supposedly has the potential to just about eclipse the Mercedes customer engine, if the current power unit can be made to work correctly and reliably. McLaren's hopes for the next three years now rest on something Red Bull has been waiting on for the last four, to no avail.

Fascinating that these two sacred cows of Formula 1 now glance across at each other's field and wonder if the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Honda will graze in Red Bull's secondary pasture next year, while Renault and Red Bull live through another year of loveless marriage. In all likelihood, Honda engines will end up in the back of the 2019 Red Bull, because there will simply be no better option - unless third-rate Renaults still end up being superior to top-spec Hondas.

McLaren feels Honda is so utterly useless that it is prepared to sacrifice millions of dollars worth of commercial funding and a works partnership to take an engine that currently would put it in contention for occasional podiums at best - exactly the sort of results McLaren was achieving in the dog days of its Mercedes relationship, with a much worse car it should be noted.

The difference of course is trust. McLaren feels it will get absolute parity with the Renault works team - something it felt it was denied by Mercedes and would still be denied even had they joined forces again; something Red Bull feels it doesn't get from Renault presently. McLaren and Renault can start fresh, and build a collaboration untroubled by volatile recent history.

McLaren's big mistake was arguably changing too much at once. Producing good chassis became its main problem circa 2013 and '14, not engines. Now, the cars are much improved but the engine is no good. Honda received only mixed messages through all this - full support one minute, public humiliation the next, depending on the given day. It's interesting to learn that both organisations emerge from this talking past each other - each feeling the other was too inflexible to make things work.

Ignorance is bliss. McLaren's future now depends entirely on something Renault has singularly failed to deliver for Red Bull under these regulations: a reliable engine. The very real risk is that Renault will not find the magic key to unlock the untapped potential lurking within its current power unit design, will then have to detune it accordingly, and McLaren will be left barely better off than it is now.

As McLaren and Renault enjoy their honeymoon, Red Bull surely faces an immediate future as the bitter, jilted former lover

Fernando Alonso will surely not stand fighting for lower top six finishes and the occasional flukey podium. The novelty will wear off quickly if he must get used to the sight of Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel disappearing down the road in front of him even with Renault in the back of his car. If Alonso walks, McLaren loses a key asset, and a chunk more of its formidable reputation with him.

Red Bull needs to hope Honda comes good, because otherwise it faces being Renault's inferior customer until the new engine rules come into play at the end of 2020. Renault is already stretched, already dependent on Red Bull's technical support to get certain things done - such as retrofitting the 2016 MGU-K design into the '17 cars when the new design failed repeatedly in testing.

McLaren will undoubtedly move in to take over that role now, leaving Red Bull less room for manoeuvre. McLaren-Renault is a three-year partnership; they will share fuel and oil supply - key to extracting proper power from these engines - and Renault is already talking of McLaren becoming its reference. As McLaren and Renault enjoy their honeymoon, Red Bull surely faces an immediate future as the bitter, jilted former lover. The third wheel at dinner. The gooseberry on a night out.

And it gets worse. By 2019, two of Red Bull's star assets could well be lost. Daniel Ricciardo is free to seek alternative employment after next season; Max Verstappen could well force his own way out of the team too. Both are unlikely to be impressed by the prospect of Red Bull-Hondas, and are sure to be hot property on the driver market in 12 months' time - when Ferrari will have a spare seat and Mercedes will surely make one available should Valtteri Bottas not take the next step.

But it's not all doom and gloom yet. McLaren and Red Bull are still potentially formidable. McLaren has finally arrested its troubling trend of having to make bad cars come good with ferocious in-season development. This year's MCL32 is a good car - good enough to keep Alonso happy during the least competitive period of his career.

Conversely, Red Bull hasn't built a really good car since 2013, but still has the requisite power, dexterity and engineering genius to turn things around quicker than almost any other team on the grid. Now unexpected windtunnel correlation troubles are fixed, it should be able to hit the ground running next year.

But both outfits have been damaged by their sustained periods of struggle. Red Bull should not be battling to keep its star drivers out of the greedy clutches of rivals; McLaren should never be finishing ninth in the constructors' championship two seasons out of three, fighting to retain its best people in the face of chronic underachievement.

But that's where pride and impatience gets you. McLaren had the best engine in F1, but decided to be too clever for its own good - giving it up for a failed experiment that leaves it battling to simply claw back the equivalent of what it once readily held in its hand.

Red Bull's unfettered frustration with Renault has driven a seemingly irreconcilable wedge between them that means Red Bull's best hope now looks to be McLaren's failed experiment finally coming good as Renault shifts its focus elsewhere.

Don't get me wrong, F1 would be far better with Red Bull and McLaren up at the front, challenging Ferrari and Mercedes on a regular basis, but you could say the same for Williams - a once-great team that also used to win championships regularly, but hasn't challenged properly in well over a decade.

Everything is clearer with hindsight of course, and clearly the predicament McLaren and Red Bull find themselves in is not entirely of their own making. But both also must take some responsibility for the present state of things - recognise they are not without flaws, that they have made mistakes, and that no team possesses an inalienable right to success in F1.

We are living through troubled times for McLaren and Red Bull, but the next 12 months should tell us a lot more about how and whether this fine mess is salvageable. Once the rot has set in, it can be awfully tough to shift.