Has McLaren’s biggest strength become its weakness?

World championship points might be what matter most to Formula 1 teams, but as McLaren heads to the Chinese Grand Prix it will be the first to confess that its third place in the constructors' standings gives it little reason to celebrate.

Its racing director Eric Boullier labelled it "funny" that the team's placing is so high right now, because he well knows it has been bailed out by its consistency and reliability in the first two races rather than out-and-out pace.

McLaren needs a rapid response, well aware that what happens over the next few weeks will pretty much dictate momentum for the remainder of its campaign. Make no bones about it: last weekend was a brutal wake-up call for the team. Its lacklustre performance in qualifying in front of its Bahraini owners - outqualified by Toro Rosso and the Honda power it ditched at the end of last season, and at no point looking like it would make it through to Q3 - hurt deeply.

Boullier later skipped his regular Saturday afternoon media briefing to remain in a brainstorming session about what had gone wrong as the inquest began. Part of the answer came from going in a wrong direction with set-up - running far too much downforce, which cost it too much time on the straights - and getting the balance wrong, which hurt tyre performance. It also left itself with a lot more to do than the opposition in chasing the right set-up, thanks to the arrival of a delayed update package that needed evaluation.

Some circumstances in Bahrain also did not play out in McLaren's favour. The track didn't suit the MCL32 chassis last year - with the team clear its concept works better on high speed circuits rather than low/medium speed venues. Such traits appear to have been carried over to this year. The handling characteristics required in Bahrain - an understeery car to help protect the rear tyres - are also those that do not sit well with Alonso's driving preferences in particular.

"This circuit requires a little bit [of a] different set-up concept for qualifying and the race distance because here the rear degradation is huge," explained the Spaniard. "With this type of circuit being stop and go, with heavy traction, corners and things like that, you need a very strong rear end.

"If you have a very strong rear end then in qualifying you struggle to rotate the car in the hairpins with the front end missing, so maybe we set up the car a little bit too much towards the race. But it is not an excuse."

Although the inquest into what went wrong on Saturday produced some early answers, the issues highlighted go beyond it just being a one-off matter for McLaren.

The first two races of the season have shown that it is lacking with its current car - and it is not the match for fellow Renault-powered team Red Bull that many had been expecting over the winter.

The first two races of the season have shown that McLaren is lacking with its current car

Red Bull has been marked out as the benchmark for McLaren in 2018, but the gaps between the two teams in qualifying have been a whopping 1.8 seconds both times (although Alonso appears to be able to hang on better in the races). It is a slightly baffling situation that does not have an obvious answer - and, as always in F1, if a team knew exactly what the problem was it would fix it immediately.

The indications are that the MCL33 is lacking in aero efficiency, which means that for a set amount of downforce being created, there is too much drag. Last year, much was made of numerous comments suggesting McLaren had the "best chassis" - a soundbite that Alonso came out with when the team was so competitive in the high altitude (with less dense air) of Mexico.

The theory from Alonso's comments was that if the team had a better engine than the Honda, it would be right up there with Mercedes and Ferrari.

But that idea was too simplistic, and there were plenty of sceptics suggesting that McLaren's performance in corners was not a valid way of judging the overall strength of its cars. Engineers from rival teams pointed out that McLaren appeared to be consistently running a high downforce configuration, so it was obvious that its performance in corners would be better.

Some cynics even went as far as suggesting this was being done to further heap pressure on Honda - by making the chassis so much quicker around the corners but the car slower down the straights. As one senior figure from a rival outfit said: "Why else would you run a monkey seat on your car at Monza?"

But McLaren strongly denied it was playing political games with its downforce levels. As chief aerodynamicist Peter Prodromou said earlier this year: "We weren't shy in trying downforce level changes at the circuit.

"In the end we tended to favour what the drivers thought were optimum for them - they had a say about the downforce level we would run based on what they would feel and what they needed. We experimented quite a lot."

So, is what we are witnessing in 2018 a carryover from last year? If the high downforce approach that flattered McLaren's cornering performance in '17 is proving [thanks to drag] to be an Achilles heel with lap time this year, has a strength turned into a weakness? A quick look at the speed trap figures from the Bahrain Grand Prix certainly suggests that McLaren is lacking in the straightline speed department compared to the other Renault-powered cars.

Alonso and Stoffel Vandoorne were slowest overall of all the cars across the start/finish line during qualifying - roughly 5km/h off the Red Bull and Renault cars. At the speed trap situated 144m before Turn 1, Vandoorne had slipped to being 10km/h adrift of Ricciardo, while Alonso was 6km/h down.

Some of this deficit may be related to the team having to make aero and engine setting compromises because of the cooling countermeasures that it has needed since pre-season testing.

But that doesn't offer all the explanation, and it could be that McLaren needs to look more fundamentally at the aerodynamic concept of the MCL33 - making its car more 'slippery' and producing more downforce without adding drag. We've already seen other top teams go pretty extreme with their sidepods in a bid to maximise aerodynamic efficiency for this year - James Allison talked about a 0.25s gain from the Mercedes approach.

"You can see we're still light in the bargeboard deflector area" Eric Boullier

And if there is one area where McLaren is perhaps giving away a lot of performance potential it is in that sidepod area. The complexity of the bodywork around the McLaren sidepod and bargeboards is lacking compared to what Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull have done - as they have quickly realised that doing so gives a lot of downforce-adding underfloor performance without causing drag.

It was interesting to note therefore that a new sidepod deflector that McLaren ran in Bahrain last week drew a striking resemblance to the one that Red Bull introduced at last year's Singapore Grand Prix (below). Wind back to that race and Red Bull, after a lacklustre start to the 2017 season where it had not been aggressive enough with its bargeboard push, introduced some Ferrari-style deflectors to complement new sidepod shapes and floor strakes that had arrived in Hungary.

Red Bull went on to step up the development of its bargeboards and ended up with a car that was able to take on Mercedes and Ferrari. Are we about to see McLaren do the same thing?

"You can see we're still light in the bargeboard deflector area," Boullier admitted in the wake of the Bahrain weekend. "We carried too much downforce here so we need to keep pushing to bring all what we call the T2 package."

Such is the complex nature of the bargeboard developments that they are not something that can be fast-tracked and added to the car from one week to another. When Alonso talked of the next two months being crucial to the team, he may well have been talking about how quickly McLaren can get on top of this key development area.

But if there is one thing McLaren has, it is conviction about its own abilities. The transformation that has taken place since Boullier arrived has been dramatic and, while the start to its new Renault era has been tougher than anticipated, the qualities within the organisation cannot be underestimated.

Now is the time it must prove whether it has retained the strengths that helped it win in the past, or if it has fallen away from the top. There is no place to hide now, and that is partly why it went down the Renault route.

For the first time in years, the job of proving what it can do is not down to its engine supplier. It's about its management, designers, engineers and mechanics doing a better job than everyone else. Its fate is in its own hands.

As Alonso keeps saying, only McLaren can control what happens from now on.

"We are confident we can do it," he said. "McLaren is one of the biggest teams in F1. If we want to deliver, it is only up to us."