How McLaren was found out in Australia

Schadenfreude is great fun if you aren't at the centre of it. After three years of McLaren blaming Honda for all its ills many revelled in the once-great team's testing troubles. From the moment the wheels started to come off its pre-season, quite literally in the case of Fernando Alonso's incident on day one of running, the narrative turned. Suddenly it was McLaren being found out as the cause of all the Honda-era ills, as while in the back of a Toro Rosso, its old engine was suddenly magically reliable.

This was always a nonsense. It was clear the McLaren was at least brisk enough to be in or around the front of the midfield battle, even though Toro Rosso's mileage seemed a miracle of such magnitude that it suggested McLaren had played a big part in the Honda reliability woes. The Australian Grand Prix disabused those notions, but McLaren has been found out in a very different way.

During the great car, duff engine years, the contention was that the McLaren chassis was a very good, or sometimes even great, one. At times this drifted into suggestions it would be as strong as Red Bull with Renault propulsion. When the Renault deal was announced, McLaren executive director Zak Brown held up Red Bull as its yardstick, and on the evidence of Australia it doesn't measure up.

But this was always going to be the case. Whatever the public pronouncements during the politically-charged days when McLaren was extricating itself from the Honda deal, the internal expectation for this season has always been fourth in the constructors' championship. That's achievable, but although McLaren does now hold that position thanks to Alonso and Stoffel Vandoorne's fifth and ninth places at Albert Park, there was an element of good fortune at play in Alonso's result in particular.

McLaren's public target now is to get up to Red Bull's level by the end of the season, but the first stage of that is for it to rise decisively to the front of the midfield. That means breaking clear of Renault and Haas, both of which had cars ahead of McLaren on the Melbourne grid. That seems a realistic and achievable objective, particularly considering some of the major upgrade package for the Australian Grand Prix has been delayed to race two in Bahrain thanks to the travails of testing. In fact, it probably won't be until the Spanish Grand Prix in May that McLaren catches up with its development plan.

As for taking on Red Bull by the end of the year, that's a huge ask. McLaren's deficit to the fastest Red Bull in qualifying was 1.8 seconds (comparing Max Verstappen's Q3 time with Alonso's Q2 effort), and while you can argue a few tenths of that was down to Alonso not getting the maximum from the car thanks to an error, Verstappen's own mistake in Q3 partly counterbalances that caveat.

This is a serious chunk of time to make up. It's certainly not impossible, and McLaren can legitimately claim the challenge of adapting to a different power unit package means it was always going to be playing catch-up.

But by setting that target, McLaren is expressing enormous confidence in its technical team. Based on the work being done internally, that could be well-placed, but on the outside there are significant and longstanding questions about McLaren to be answered.

After all, while McLaren is seen as a powerhouse team thanks to its glorious history, it really isn't that today. It does not operate on the scale of a Mercedes, Ferrari or Red Bull, and it was creaking even before the ill-fated switch to Honda that seemed like such a great idea at the time.

While McLaren is seen as a powerhouse team thanks to its glorious history, it really isn't that today

McLaren has won just one world championship in the 21st century - Lewis Hamilton's sensational last-gasp drivers' title triumph in 2008. Prior to that, you have to go back to 1999 for its previous one, and to a season earlier for its last constructors' championship. That's just one year more recent than Williams's last constructors' crown, albeit with the caveat that the off-track shenanigans of 2007 cost McLaren that year's title.

More recently, there have been mis-steps. After Hamilton's title win, McLaren slumped in 2009. While this was partly the consequence of becoming embroiled in an aggressive development war with Ferrari through to the end of '08, it was also caused by vastly underestimating the downforce potential of the newly-introduced skinny aero regulations and missing tricks such as the double diffuser.

During that season, McLaren recovered and became a winning force again, but in the years that followed it never quite matched up to the standards set by Red Bull. Yes, there were wins and high points, such as the innovation of the f-duct that allowed the driver to stall the rear wing on the straights by covering a hole in the cockpit, but there were also overly-elaborate blind alleys such as the 'bagpipe' exhaust.

Even when things went right performance wise, such as in 2012, a litany of reliability problems and pitlane errors potentially cost McLaren the championship. In fact, it was Hamilton's gearbox failure while leading that year's Singapore Grand Prix that arguably gave him the final push he needed to sign on the dotted line with Mercedes.

What followed was a serious error, with a change in car concept for 2013 - the final year before one of the biggest regulation changes in F1 history - relegating McLaren from race-winner to also-ran status. Remember, McLaren went two years with Mercedes propulsion without winning a race before heading into its Honda nightmare, and it was the fifth best team in the first year of the V6 hybrid engines.

This is why we must not deceive ourselves into assuming McLaren producing a top car is a given. The last definitively frontrunning McLaren was on track six years ago, so the technical team at Woking has much to prove and no longer has the free pass provided by Honda.

Here is also where things get difficult, because as you get closer to the front in F1 the law of diminishing returns becomes ever more powerful. While the current deficit is enough for there still to be some fruit hanging not too far up the tree, the closer McLaren gets to Red Bull the harder it is to make gains.

In the background is the financial landscape of the team. Ditching Honda and signing up with Renault meant the McLaren shareholders had to dig deep into their pockets, and the executive committee will be expecting to see results. While objectives will be realistic, the pressure will start to build on Zak Brown and Eric Boullier if progress is not forthcoming. Money is not infinite, and McLaren is trying to deliver its performance gains on a smaller budget than F1's top teams.

That's what made the Australian Grand Prix result such a relief for all involved. While there was always confidence that the McLaren MCL33 was a brisk enough package - something underpinned by Alonso's pace in the final minutes of testing - you couldn't blame the team's leadership for having some nervous moments.

"It was frustrating because we knew that there wasn't anything fundamentally wrong with the design of the car, but we had more bad luck than anyone else," says Brown.

"And at some point, you do go 'why do we have so much bad luck?'. But we kept our heads down, tried not to get rattled by it and this result will go a long way to rebuilding that confidence. It was tough because everybody's watching us so closely so no one's giving us much of a break."

"The Melbourne result will go a long way to rebuilding confidence" Zak Brown

And why would anyone give McLaren a break? One of the things Brown has worked hard to cultivate is the image of the historic and great McLaren team, so expectations could not be higher. It's a sign of how far the team has fallen that a fifth place - a result that would have been considered pathetic through the glory years - could mean so much.

Brown talks about this as the start of the journey. Realistically, it was never going to be a question of bolting in French propulsion then happy days, convenient as it was at the time to suggest so. McLaren has been found out by the disabusing of that notion.

The real challenge begins now, from this zero-point of being a team that can fight at the front of the midfield. What happens over the next eight months will tell us a lot about whether McLaren's objective to bring back the glory days is realistic or hubristic. And that's going to depend on sheer hard graft.

There are no magic technical bullets in F1 anymore, and McLaren must show its technical leadership is robust, self-critical and focused in delivering that performance. And don't forget that regarding Red Bull, it has to match the development rate of a team that you could still make a case for being - aerodynamically - the best in F1 simply to hold the current gap.

The Australia upgrade package worked well, although the car on track still looks a little tricky at times and stability gains must be made. For Bahrain, the all-important bargeboard updates are due, which should deliver significant performance. Having originally been planned for last weekend, they were delayed by the need to react to the problems of testing. But on the positive side, the team is justifiably confident that its factory-to-track correlation is strong and that this, combined with the recent gains it has made in signing off, producing and getting parts on the car, means its development rate can be rapid enough.

We are going to learn a lot about McLaren during the course of 2018. While Honda was certainly the chief architect of its recent woes, McLaren still has much to do to prove it is operating at anything approaching the level of the big three teams it aspires to mix with.

Nobody can fault the ambition. But we have now found out for sure where McLaren really stands, and right now it's as a handy midfielder rather than a frontrunner. This is a solid start, but now, with no more excuses, it's time to deliver.