How F1 has broken two of its greatest teams

'Adapt or die' is a law of nature that applies perfectly to professional sport - and particularly to F1. It's easy to fall foul of this, especially when adaptation is essentially all that colossal amount of time and money is spent on doing each year. F1 is forever evolving, so its teams are too, but what to do when evolution leaves you eating dust?

There's no sadder sight in sport than the slow, public decay of a once-great competitor valiantly trying, but failing, to recapture past glories. That deep-rooted determination never to quit is at the heart of what it means to compete professionally, but at the highest level there's nowhere to hide once your reactions have faded and legs have gone.

When you're still so invested in trying to find new ways to be better, faster and stronger, it can be difficult to see what's going on around you. Even if the self-awareness is there, accepting the circumstances is like admitting defeat.

It is anathema to what made you great in the first place. It is unthinkable.

It must be agony for those who wander the halls of Williams HQ in Grove or McLaren's Technology Centre in Woking. It's said that time makes fools of us all, and these two great teams look increasingly foolish as they slip towards the foot of F1's competitive order. Collectively, they've won almost 300 grands prix and nearly 40 world titles, but it's been six seasons and over 100 races since either took home a winner's trophy.

As McLaren and Williams have become increasingly stuck in their winless runs, the game has changed and continued to change around them. Now, F1 teams can be broadly divided into two groups: the manufacturer (or works partner) teams: Mercedes, Ferrari, Renault and Red Bull-Honda; and the customer teams engaged in what are jargonistically known as 'technical partnerships' with said manufacturer teams - namely Alfa Romeo (formerly Sauber) and Haas in the Ferrari camp, and Toro Rosso as Red Bull's 'B-team'.

Racing Point falls between the cracks. Buying as much of the Mercedes rear end as permitted, coupled with fresh investment from Lawrence Stroll's consortium, suggests a team on the up, that stands apart from McLaren and Williams owing to a stronger recent track record and lean and mean approach to infrastructure and outsourcing of production.

Withdrawal symptoms

Both appear to be suffering withdrawal symptoms from their days aligned to major carmakers. Williams hasn't enjoyed a works engine partnership since its alliance with BMW ended in 2005, while McLaren is in recovery following a much more recent (and acrimonious) failed dalliance with Honda.

The circumstances are unique to each team, but there are common threads. Firstly, there's the question of status. Being affiliated to a global car manufacturer not only nominally provides a cheap supply of engines plus extra resources (depending on the structure of the deal), it's also a point of leverage for wooing sponsors and personnel. F1 is so often a numbers game - the bigger the better - and manufacturer engine deals allow you to throw bigger numbers at winning.

The major sticking point for McLaren and Williams is their fiercely protected independence. In 2005 Frank Williams could have sold out to BMW - as Peter Sauber partly did a year later - but he refused and Williams has never been the same since.

On the one hand, the team's wonderful heritage is protected and lives on; but on the other it's rendered like insects in amber - left with remnants of what once was, caught between the rock of being under-resourced and the hard place of being too big to shrink without almost ripping up the whole thing and starting again. Sauber fell on hard times too, of course, but pragmatism ruled purity and the team he built now looks set to thrive again - even if the price is a change of name above the door.

Williams has committed to trying to grow its own way, diversifying into Advanced Engineering, finding different ways to succeed with what it has, but it now looks trapped between business models at either end of the F1 scale it simply cannot match. McLaren remained in the works game longer, but Ron Dennis's refusal to cede further control to Mercedes blew that partnership apart, sending Mercedes down the path to its current success. McLaren even played a key role in brokering the engine deal that kept Ross Brawn's former works Honda team on the grid before Mercedes took over. To think, all that subsequent success could have belonged to McLaren.

Ron did a deal with Honda instead - exclusive supply of works engines and sponsorship to boot - but we all know how spectacularly that backfired. If Red Bull becomes champion again, or wins races with Honda, it will look like a terrible own goal for McLaren. It too is now stuck in No Man's Land - a team built around factory ideals, no longer big enough and refined enough to compete with F1's biggest beasts, but too large to react to faster minnows.

Williams once argued it was still possible to win the world championship as a Mercedes customer team in the hybrid era, but it hasn't built on the momentum that adroit engine deal gave it in 2014-15, when it finished third in the constructors' championship two seasons in succession, because it lags way behind in other key areas - aerodynamics in particular. McLaren argued the exact opposite but has come unstuck thanks to a combination of incompetence (its own and Honda's) and impatience. It also lags where it once led technologically, no longer possessing a state-of-the-art windtunnel, for example.

This is not necessarily a recipe for disaster, but the problem is McLaren and Williams look outmoded in a world where smaller rivals are moving ahead thanks to a submissive approach to manufacturer dominance. It's clear buying chunks of a Ferrari or a Mercedes is a more effective way to compete than building a Williams or a McLaren from the ground up. Realistically, the current ceiling for McLaren and Williams is being best of the midfield - ahead of Renault while it's still rebuilding - but they are nowhere near that, struggling against teams such as Racing Point and Haas, which are achieving way more on fractions of the resource required to keep McLaren and Williams in the game.

To put in perspective, Mercedes spent more than £300million to win the 2017 world titles with a team of more than 850 people on the chassis side and around 1200 including the engine. McLaren competed with nearly 700 people on a £173m budget (with Honda); Williams used nearly 600 people and a £120m budget. Racing Point did better with nearly 200 people fewer than Williams while spending under £100m. Haas employs a team of under 200 people, meaning it gets more bang for its buck from a £100m estimated spend.

The spiral of decline

Set against a backdrop of rising costs and declining sponsorship revenues - or should we say increasing difficulty in attracting sufficient sponsorship revenue, which all teams have suffered since the loss of overt tobacco advertising to Formula 1 - it pays to have a rich benefactor.

For Ferrari, Mercedes and Renault, that benefactor is a major carmaker. Red Bull (and to a lesser extent Toro Rosso) counts on Dietrich Mateschitz, and no longer pays for engines now it is with Honda. Haas has Gene Haas; Alfa Romeo/Sauber relies on Ferrari technical support and Swedish financing; Racing Point has Lawrence Stroll. Williams used to have Stroll, but no more; no longer can it count on Martini either.

It previously lost major partner HP as a direct result of refusing to jump deeper into bed with BMW. Its residual financial safety net looks increasingly frayed, new title sponsorship deal with Rokit notwithstanding. Its share price has been steadily decreasing in the past year after a boost at the start of 2017. McLaren is more fortunate in counting on the patronage of a Bahraini sovereign wealth fund, but it also depends on diversification, Applied Technologies and an increasingly successful Automotive division to bolster its financial standing.

How to attract and retain the best drivers and personnel when you cannot compete with your rivals on and off the track? Red Bull bent over backwards to keep star designer Adrian Newey happy during its fallow recent period as a Renault engine customer, and still spent big to stay (occasionally) in the winners' circle.

Newey is arguably the defining factor in the gradual competitive decline of both McLaren and Williams. Williams hasn't won a championship since Newey's influence departed the design office, and couldn't convince him to return before he joined Red Bull; McLaren likewise was never quite the same once Newey was no longer around.

Without such stability and star power, a peculiar kind of paralysis appears to have taken hold - both teams have enacted significant behind-the-scenes overhauls without showing signs of progress. Management and technical structures have been revamped again and again; key personnel hired and fired shortly thereafter.

Williams began the hybrid era with 2008 championship runner-up Felipe Massa alongside future Mercedes race winner Valtteri Bottas in its cars, and finished last season with two inexperienced paying drivers. Key engineers and designers have also come and gone. Not long ago McLaren had two world champions on its F1 books, but Fernando Alonso has finally had enough and now McLaren must count on the relatively inexperienced line-up of Carlos Sainz Jr and Lando Norris. The new broom has again recently swept through the design corridors of Woking too.

Both teams' ability to attract true star F1 power looks on the wane, which affects their ability to pull in sponsors, which leads to under-resourcing of their F1 programmes, which leads to poor track performance, which reduces prize money revenues coming in, which reduces further the ability to invest in the people and infrastructure necessary to turn things around - all while your rivals move the goal posts further away.

Both teams also cling to their historical roots, while being outmanoeuvred by organisations with less tradition. The current Mercedes team can loosely trace its lineage to Tyrrell; Red Bull through Jaguar to Stewart; Renault's 'Team Enstone' has taken many forms. McLaren's lofty ambition to become the British Ferrari hasn't been realised, while the special payment Williams receives from F1 for protecting its heritage, worth £10m in 2017 and a little less last year, looks like a mere drop in the ocean.

Blame it on the good times

Prior success can hang around the collective neck like pearls of lead. Part of Williams's vast improvement in pitstop performance since 2014 came from slaying sacred cows that still used grazing methods dating back to the 1980s and '90s - the prevailing thinking being 'those procedures worked when we won championships so why change them?'

Destroying weaknesses you don't know you have is as important as attacking the obvious ones. To its credit, Williams is attempting what deputy team principal Claire Williams calls a "cultural transformation", clearly recognising that the game is constantly changing. You simply must change with it.

There's a danger that teams with proud histories get trapped by their own hubris. Williams has persisted with designing and building its gearboxes because it always has, and it has a department resourced to that end. But would it not be better off taking a Mercedes design 'off the shelf' and diverting resources elsewhere?

McLaren finished 2012 with the best car on the grid but, instead of building on that success, went aggressive for '13 in a bid to outdo Red Bull. It was historically the 'McLaren Way' to push boundaries, take risks and innovate, but it came spectacularly unstuck with a car that lacked compliance and aerodynamic consistency.

In preparation for a return to glory with Honda, much energy was expended on trying to change McLaren's culture, to create an environment where the technical departments would no longer over-reach and instead seek pragmatic solutions that took cues from better-funded and higher-achieving rivals.

To a certain extent it succeeded in this regard - the 2017 McLaren chassis was genuinely decent on certain circuits - but it didn't work in harmony with the Honda engine and its successor was badly born while the team focused on minimising the hassle of switching to Renault. So poorly was it conceived that it produced less downforce than its predecessor. The error was not identified and fixed early enough and the team reverted to type with a new round of bloodletting and blame-gaming.

Contrast this with the "brutal honesty" Toto Wolff and his associates have instilled at Mercedes, a culture of success underpinned by embracing mistakes rather than fearing them. None of this is particularly revelatory, but it is thrown into sharper relief now McLaren and Williams are being squeezed at both ends.

The bigger, better teams are stretching ever further away in nearly all areas, while the leaner, more agile minnows are achieving much better bang for their buck. Rather like Brexit Britain, the country's most successful and beloved teams look horribly and brutally exposed.

Can either escape "the void"?

Martin Brundle describes the place McLaren and Williams presently occupy in F1 as "the void". It's an apt description, suggesting the lifeblood of these great teams is being sucked away by the changing landscape, leaving nothing but empty space. McLaren and Williams both accept conditions are tough for independent constructors - of which they are the only two - in F1 right now, but they refuse to entertain a 'can't-beat-'em-join-'em' approach.

They would prefer F1 and the FIA to redraw the rules to restrict the partnerships that have borne such recent fruit for the likes of Haas and Alfa, and are expecting results from the major overhaul of F1's regulations and commercial arrangements due in 2021. A budget cap and a B-team ban would certainly aid their plight.

For better or worse these proud teams have remained steadfast in the face of the changing nature of F1, guarding their independence and heritage despite the decay of their competitive standing. As they slip further, this attitude looks misguided under the present rules. Perhaps they'll ultimately be proved correct. Maybe the world will change.

It would be wonderful to see these British institutions rise to F1's summit again, and do it their way. But as things stand they don't look built to thrive. The climb up F1's mountain is unrelenting. It shows no mercy. You must adapt, or you will surely die.