Has Red Bull fallen into McLaren's Honda trap?

Over-promise and under-deliver in Formula 1 and you have the recipe for a PR nightmare. That stands as the only real legacy for the second-coming of McLaren-Honda. McLaren was confident that Honda would take it back to the sharp end, that the partnership would win again, and Honda would mix it with Mercedes and Ferrari.

The pain of failing to live up to expectations is part of the reason Honda treads so cautiously when discussing its prospects now. Working to rebuild its reputation with Toro Rosso last season, still with high expectations and pressure but away from the spotlight, was a welcome change of pace.

That changes in 2019. Honda is partnered with Red Bull as well as its junior team, and like it or not that comes with much greater public interest. Especially when Red Bull's upper echelons include the opinionated, vocal and unapologetically honest Helmut Marko.

In some ways, there's a growing sense of deja vu. If you subscribe to the view that, while it should be buoyed by Honda's progress in 2018 with Toro Rosso, Red Bull should be keeping its powder dry before it has hard evidence in testing, then it's easy to think it might have fallen into the same trap as McLaren early on: making confident predictions before the new partnership has hit the track.

Referencing an early-2018 boast from Lewis Hamilton about Mercedes' most powerful engine settings for qualifying, Marko has said he's confident Red Bull will have use of a 'party mode' for the first time with Honda. "The Honda engine is already slightly above the Renault engine," he insisted. "If you combine our GPS data with the data provided by Honda, we'll be in the Mercedes and Ferrari region."

This is his strongest claim, although last year he was adamant - along with driver Max Verstappen - that Honda had surpassed Renault, Red Bull's engine partner until now, for the first time. Marko has since declared that Red Bull was in a 'B category' to Mercedes and Ferrari with Renault power.

Assuming the position that Red Bull is immediately putting Honda under too much pressure, you can argue this is even worse than what McLaren did. At least McLaren's (overstretched) optimism was rooted in a phenomenal history with the Japanese manufacturer and the blissful ignorance of having no real-world data to suggest that Honda would get its entry into the new world of V6 turbo-hybrids so badly wrong.

Regardless of solid Honda performance and reliability in 2018, Red Bull's got three years of McLaren-Honda turmoil to keep its expectations grounded when it comes to what can be achieved when Honda tries to crank it up to 11.

"Most probably we won't be able to get through the season on three engines. We consciously accept engine penalties if necessary" Helmut Marko

There's little doubt that if Honda had total control over the messaging to the public over its 2019 prospects, things would have been slightly different. Honda's party line is more reserved and based on the target of starting the season third best, cementing its place ahead of Renault, before speeding up its development.

However, and this may sound like the words of a Red Bull-Honda apologist, when one examines Marko's comments in the full context of Honda's progress, its development plans and what Red Bull brings to the table, the picture looks rather different.

While it is true that Marko's and Verstappen's words do heighten anticipation of where Honda is at and what Red Bull can achieve, remember that this comes after full access to Honda's data and real-world experience with Toro Rosso, not just dyno numbers since Abu Dhabi.

More importantly, it was always going to be the case that Honda would have bigger expectations this year. It is a major manufacturer with huge ambition and great pride. Given the public perception was that it had moved into third place in 2018, anything less than being ahead of Renault in '19 and closing the gap to Mercedes and Ferrari would represent a backwards step. Whatever Red Bull says in public does not really impact this, which is why even Honda itself was happy to talk about setting its targets higher.

"We are not really keen to say a specific time, but Mercedes and Ferrari have loads of knowledge of the grey areas [of the rules], so they are still ahead of us," Honda's motorsport boss Masashi Yamamoto told Autosport in Abu Dhabi last November.

"But after four years of our development and trying, we think we are now finding the right direction and where to go - much clearer than last year, or two years ago. So, we think we can speed up our development."

Another point is that even though Red Bull and Honda both expect decent performance levels in 2019, it will not be a huge surprise to see the odd reliability problem and tactical grid penalties. This would not represent a diversion from Marko's upbeat chatter, either. In fact, he's made his position extremely clear.

"We are aware that it will probably be difficult with reliability," he said. "Most probably we won't be able to get through the season on three engines. That will be the concept, that we consciously accept engine penalties if necessary."

Honda remains optimistic it will make further performance gains in time for the start of the 2019 campaign, although it is still trying to improve its reliability. Reports at the start of this year suggested Honda had discovered a new vibration problem when testing its engine, but it's understood that this is incorrect and that the manufacturer has not experienced a major problem.

Another setback emerged with the news that Honda had discussions with Austrian engineering company and consultant AVL about a possible collaboration, then decided not to take this any further. But it's thought that this would have related to a longer-term project rather than anything for the 2019 engine. So this is not to be interpreted as Honda's house of cards collapsing all over again.

That does not mean Red Bull-Honda can enter 2019 with zero reservations. What was clear from the end of last season is there is no conclusive evidence that its product is capable of completing seven grands prix without fault. There were so many changes in the final third of the season that each engine was barely doing a third of that.

If Red Bull promises the world and Honda fails to deliver then yes, it would feel like Groundhog Day. McLaren may even struggle to hide a wry smile

That will be an area of relative unknown for Honda to discover, even though progress will have been made in the off-season. Perhaps Red Bull will need to wait until the end of the year, or even 2020, for more concrete reliability.

Marko and team principal Christian Horner also both made it clear that Renault wasn't exactly a shining beacon of durability, as although Red Bull had good success with the Spec C engine late in the year, it did have to revert to the Spec B for high-altitude races because of reliability concerns.

Honda introduced two engine upgrades in 2018, both of which resulted in better performance, but the second initially came at a cost of durability as it battled gearbox oscillations. Pierre Gasly then suffered an oil leak in the season finale in Abu Dhabi. It would therefore be fair to conclude that Honda hardly covered itself in glory on the reliability front at the end of the season.

The evolution of the engine design that Honda intends to start the 2019 campaign with should not come with a repeat of those problems. When Honda rejoined the F1 grid in 2015 it had an abysmal season and while '16 was hardly stunning, it made solid progress that year.

The big problem came when it overhauled its package for 2017 and suffered a major reliability setback, triggering a sequence of events that led to its McLaren divorce.

With Red Bull, Honda is preparing to keep the same broad engine concept for the first time in this engine era, using an evolution of the design that it believes still has untapped potential as well as guaranteeing better reliability than another overhaul. This is a further reason to be confident that Red Bull's expectations of Honda are realistic despite what happened in the past.

"We can carry over the current design, or concept, of power unit," Honda F1 technical director Toyoharu Tanabe told Autosport at the end of last season. "We don't know exactly [what the limit is] because we haven't achieved a high level, but we started with another concept and changed it for 2017.

"We think this concept change is not wrong. It's suitable. When you change the concept of the design a lot, it's very hard to get reliability. It depends on the design level but I'm comfortable with carrying over our current concept."

When pre-season testing took place one year ago, stories emerged that Honda was changing the engines in the Toro Rosso cars every day. That's the only reason, critics and sceptics were quick to claim, the team was racking up so much mileage.

Likewise, as Honda's progress became clearer through the season, the narrative changed to declare that was only possible because Toro Rosso was sacrificing every other grand prix weekend.

Neither accusation holds much water. Honda has always insisted it did not have such an engine strategy in testing, and attempts to undermine its gains in 2018 conveniently ignore the fact that changing lots of engines was what Honda had to do with McLaren from 2015 to '17.

If Red Bull promises the world and Honda fails to deliver then yes, it would feel like Groundhog Day. McLaren may even struggle to hide a wry smile. But don't overlook the crucial differences between now and when Honda was named and shamed by McLaren, and exposed as a weak link.

Red Bull's confidence is rooted in reality, it has peppered its boasts with an understanding that everything will not be perfect straight away, and the Red Bull house is in better shape than McLaren's was. Nobody will ever stop Marko from speaking his mind, but that does not mean he will push Red Bull into the same trap that unforgivingly ensnared McLaren.