Ditching Honda would leave McLaren nowhere to hide

If this season marks the end of McLaren's engine partnership with Honda, then switching to Renault engines would leave the team no place to hide in 2018.

Chassis-wise, it would be compared directly to Red Bull, and the works Renault team; and if Fernando Alonso stays on alongside Stoffel Vandoorne, then McLaren would be, driver-wise, able to go up against Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo. That means no excuses - it's put up or shut up.

The entire situation is a little sad for Honda. It came back to Formula 1 with the best of intentions and by allying itself with McLaren was very much there to be shot at. Honda could have spent a couple of years learning the ropes with a smaller team, but it didn't and that has led to a big cost financially and in terms of credibility.

The relationship between McLaren and Honda never seemed to gel. But we have to remember that it's not just about Honda, because during this period we had Ron Dennis ousting Martin Whitmarsh before later being ousted himself. These have been strange days in the boardroom, and that seems to have consumed far more attention than building the relationship with Honda.

We hear a lot about Honda from McLaren, but can you imagine what those at Honda have made of McLaren? This was a team that dominated F1 during their previous relationship, but it will have been difficult to have faith in Woking. Ending the relationship with Honda doesn't make all of that go away.

It's been a long time since McLaren won a grand prix. You have to go back to Jenson Button's victory in the final round of 2012, which pre-dates the Honda alliance. There are some serious questions to answer.

Its last title came in 2008, which is a long time by F1 standards. During that period McLaren has diversified as a company, and when this happens its focus can be diluted. The overall success of the group is the main objective and it's easy to take your eye off what got you there in the first place: the race team.

You could compare it to Williams. It also diversified, albeit more modestly, but still the top brass lost focus and before long were playing catch-up. That's never easy to live with, especially when the results come in on a Sunday afternoon. But Red Bull Racing is much more focused, and would be a very tough yardstick to be measured against.

For a start, Red Bull won't make the same mistakes for 2018 that it made at the start of this year in terms of car concept. As for McLaren, we don't know. During the Honda years, it has done an increasing amount of finger-pointing, but it needs to get its own house in order. Remember, Alonso retired from the Italian Grand Prix with a gearbox problem and while it could have been down to engine vibration or something similar, McLaren's reliability has been less than impressive.

I don't see McLaren being anything other than a third Renault team. And it's not going to solve all of its problems immediately

You also have to look at Red Bull's history with Renault. The relationship between them has not been great during the V6 hybrid era, and the six victories from 2014 to date have owed far more to others throwing races away than Red Bull winning them. There's no question that Red Bull would have defected to another supplier - Mercedes in particular - if it had been possible to do so.

It's going to take a few more years of building Enstone back up for Renault's works team to be a winning outfit - if that ever happens at all. Red Bull has been a winning team in all but one of the last nine seasons.

I don't see McLaren being anything other than a third Renault team. That might not be a bad place to be, but right now the Renault is not as strong a power unit as the Mercedes or the Ferrari, and reliability is not great. It might be better than Honda, and it might have big potential, but it's not going to solve all of McLaren's problems immediately.

And there is a risk attached to this option. McLaren's shareholders have very deep pockets, but there is a reason for that and they are very astute in business. McLaren is not overloaded with sponsorship and to throw away a huge amount of money, reputed to be around $100million per year, is a brave move.

Someone, presumably Zak Brown, is going to have to drag in some more sponsorship dollars to make up the shortfall. If not, the shareholders are going to look at the balance sheet a little more often and start asking some awkward questions.

McLaren should have huge potential. It has a facility that is second to none - or, at least, that's what we're led to believe - but with another season like 2017, next year things could quickly start to unravel. We've seen this with other teams. Things don't go as planned, the good people get snatched up and very soon you need to start restructuring.

This can leave you in a holding pattern than can last for months, if not years. This is what the works Renault team is now working on trying to recover from.

While you could blame Honda for McLaren's position, the team went into this relationship with its eyes open. The rationale was that, with a Mercedes engine, it would never be able to beat the works team. By tying up with Honda, it became a genuine works team. But simply being a works team does not guarantee success; just ask Toyota or BMW.

Also, it's important to remember that McLaren was not even the best Mercedes customer team in the first year of the new regulations, finishing well behind Williams and only just ahead of Force India in the constructors' championship.

While Honda has unquestionably got it badly wrong, the knowledge base at the McLaren Technology Centre, which includes its own electronics division, means it should long ago have taken over responsibility for some, if not all, of the hybrid part of the engine.

McLaren and Honda were in this together, so should have worked together to become a genuine works team. That this didn't happen is a concern, and it would be a mistake to assume that a change of engine supplier eliminates any of the problems on the McLaren side that contributed to this.

It's difficult to know how Honda got it so wrong. It didn't come in until the second season of the new power units, so gave the rest a head-start, but McLaren was using the market-leading engine and would have had all the knowledge it needed to help steer Honda on MGU-H and MGU-K useage. You could say that wouldn't have been cricket, but all is fair in love and war - and motorsport.

As part of this potential change around, Toro Rosso would supposedly get Honda engines. It'd be on something of a hiding to nothing

Mercedes has done an exceptional job, Ferrari is now knocking on the door and Renault is playing catch-up. But I don't think the Honda story would have been any different had it come in earlier. Honda sets a direction and goes that way; getting it to change direction is like trying to alter the course of an oil tanker with a canoe paddle.

That the McLaren project has come to this, and that Sauber turned its back on a partnership that would have been excellent commercially, is bad news for Honda.

Honda, like anyone that gets involved in F1, has a major facility in the UK for the operation of the engines. But it was too easy to think that all the design and development work could be done in Japan, with only servicing and running of the power units in Europe. When you're away from the cliff face, it's too easy to become detached. Also, getting good people with current experience is important, and Honda didn't do much of that.

And Sauber rejecting Honda for a known quantity from Ferrari shows that cash and being able to be a works team isn't everything. Ferrari is assisting Sauber, and there seems to be a kind of junior-team feel to it, but it will still be a customer outfit.

As part of this change-around, Toro Rosso would supposedly get Honda engines. But it would be on something of a hiding to nothing. Today, it can be measured against the Red Bull and the works Renault team, but as the sole Honda team that would all be lost.

Honda obviously brings significant budget, and Toro Rosso would be a works team for the first time. But for all the good work done there by technical director James Key, you can't just plug in a load more staff and expect it to bring results overnight.

The biggest problem may be motivation, both for the engineers and the drivers. Currently Toro Rosso uses the same power unit as Red Bull, but doesn't have as strong a chassis. Now the engine may get swapped for the one that's very much fourth out of four.

I suppose Red Bull looks at it as a good potential investment for Toro Rosso. It has spent a lot of money on it over the years, and Honda would be a big boost. And it would also mean that, should the Honda power unit suddenly take a big step forwards, then Red Bull could take Honda engines itself. But that's a very big ask for Honda.

Toro Rosso is also looking at a lot of late nights if it has to adapt the car for Honda power, as getting design details this late in the season doesn't make it easy to put together a fully integrated car concept. I could see Toro Rosso having a B-spec of the car for introduction at, say, May's Spanish Grand Prix.

At least with Honda's money, that wouldn't be a big problem. But it would require Honda to do what it has failed to do since returning in 2015: make big enough steps with the engine to catch up.

Hamilton - and Mercedes - in a different league

Over my years in F1, many people have asked me which grand prix they should go to. My answer has always been Monza.

It's not necessarily the racing that makes it worth a visit, it's just that no other circuit oozes the emotion that Monza does. Just one look at the old banking gives you the shivers, and the Ferrari fans turning the grandstands red gives you the feeling that you could be standing in more or less the same spot some 50 years ago and things would have been just the same.

At least half of the spectators have eyes only for Ferrari, and when a team member, let alone a famous driver, goes into any public area, they just get mobbed. When a Ferrari leaves the pits, the noise level multiplies by 10.

The following is fantastic, but if things go wrong for Ferrari they all start heading home with hunched shoulders, expecting action to be taken.

Qualifying at Monza was messy, and the strange thing was that it was the new surface on the main straight causing the problems with flooding, as the rest of the track looked reasonable.

Perhaps it's time that the FIA stepped in and made sure that any new surface has more precise regulations governing crown or slope from one side to the other. It wouldn't have to be much, but it would stop puddles from forming in the middle of the track and optimise the drainage.

Lewis Hamilton was the maestro in very changeable conditions in qualifying. He is just able to pick up the grip, and his pole lap was once again exceptional. Ferrari floundered in the wet conditions and neither driver looked like they had any grip or confidence, with both continually making small errors.

But Lance Stroll and Esteban Ocon were the stars of wet qualifying. Second and third on the grid was a bonus thanks to the Red Bull penalties, but both outperformed their more experienced team-mates and never put a foot wrong. They delivered quick laps when others didn't, then brought home points.

In reality, it was a Sunday afternoon drive in the park for Mercedes. Valtteri Bottas made life a little more difficult for himself with his poor qualifying, but when he got into second place both him and Hamilton were able to turn it all down and cruise. There was a lot more pace available that neither used.

Ferrari wasn't in contention all weekend, definitely missing something in the dry and a bit more in the wet. Third and fifth was OK, but for Vettel to finish 36 seconds behind the winning Mercedes, and give up the drivers' championship lead at Monza, means that Italy will be asking for explanations and actions.

Red Bull made the best of a bad job in terms of grid penalties, and while Max Verstappen finished 10th after damaging his front wing and picking up a puncture hitting Felipe Massa, Daniel Ricciardo drove a superb race.

He made some great overtaking moves and has an exceptional feel of the brakes. His commitment to using that is second to none, with his pass on Kimi Raikkonen brilliantly executed. Without grid penalties, it wouldn't have taken much for Red Bull to beat both Ferraris.

But it was only the engine penalties that brought excitement to the race. On performance, Mercedes is now ahead of Ferrari, and by a reasonable amount. Yes, Monza is primarily a power and car-efficiency track, and it's the only one of its kind in the season, but both of these car characteristics are still important at every track.

Mercedes screwed up in Singapore a couple of years ago, but I wouldn't count on it happening again this year. When it needs to dig deep and find solutions, Mercedes seems to be able to do it just that little bit better than anyone else.