How McLaren plans to defuse a ticking timebomb

It's now been almost 20 years since McLaren last won a Formula 1 constructors' championship. It's been 10 years since it last won an F1 title of any description. Five full seasons have passed since this mighty British team last won a grand prix. That's almost 100 races ago. Three seasons have gone by since one of its drivers legitimately stood on the podium.

This is not the track record of a top team. In fact, for the past five years McLaren has been categorically mired in F1's midfield, consistently misfiring in attempts to recapture past glories. One season of underachievement can be considered a blip; two a bump in the road; but how much momentum does it take before this becomes a worrying pattern of decline?

There is a cautionary tale seen in that other great British giant of F1, seemingly stuck permanently in the midfield, dreaming of a return to glory days that may never come again. Two decades ago, Williams won its last championship double with Renault. After subsequently failing to deliver the requisite success with BMW, Williams has spent the last 12 seasons flitting between different customer engine programmes, trying desperately to claw its way back to the front, but never quite making it.

Williams remains a wonderful name, with a proud heritage, but the world has changed. Williams is no longer the top team it once was, consigned instead to a constant fight for survival in the midfield maelstrom.

Despite its own championship drought since the turn of the Millennium, McLaren remained a consistent contender with Mercedes as its works engine partner, winning races in all bar two seasons (2006 and 2013) until the end of F1's V8 era. Then V6 hybrid turbo engines arrived and Mercedes began dominating as a works entity in its own right. McLaren decided winning in Formula 1 as a customer team was impossible, so jumped into bed with Honda, and now here we are - three seasons of abject failure later and McLaren is back to being a customer team again.

All the while the ticking timebomb of decay does its dirty work. Confidence seeps away, sponsors leave, the team's finances suffer, which makes it tougher still to compete as successful rivals stretch ever further away. This is the fate that befell Williams more than a decade ago, and it's one that surely awaits McLaren too if it cannot find a way to properly arrest this slump.

"I think we're fortunate we have a very committed ownership base," argues McLaren's executive director Zak Brown. "Williams, because they're a publicly traded company, have to live within the financial means they're given - they had to take, in the past, [Pastor] Maldonado, and drivers that weren't world championship quality, to stay alive.

"We can make decisions purely based on performance, knowing we've got the financial resources. Our shareholders are very open on a case-by-case [basis]. So far they have given us all the tools we need. We certainly don't have an unlimited chequebook - which it appears some of the competition has - but they give us what we need to go racing.

"A great team like McLaren can survive a year or two, but these past few years - especially last year because we've gone backwards - it's been difficult" McLaren executive director Zak Brown

"We can make that big financial decision that short-term has economic impact but long-term is the right thing. Our shareholders can take a long-term view, which is exactly what they've done. We've got the racing budget we requested."

Financial support from its Bahraini backers creates a welcome safety net for McLaren during this time of strife, cushioning the financial blow of the Honda divorce while allowing the purchase of Renault customer engines for the next three years, plus retention of star driver Fernando Alonso - for 2018 at least.

Maintaining positive momentum when results are unforthcoming for so long is extraordinarily difficult. The financial impact of the failed Honda experiment was two-fold - causing sponsors to leave McLaren while it failed, then costing the team Honda's substantial monetary support upon the premature dissolution of the partnership.

Brown acknowledges the serious impact of the Honda nightmare on the team, but says the end of that era also represents opportunity to remake McLaren anew.

"If you look at the history of McLaren, it's one that retains partners for a long time, and if you look at our racecar it's got fewer sponsors than it has ever had, so commercially we've not bought on partners at the same rate they historically have," Brown concedes.

"There are two types of sponsor: those that leave the sport and you don't know if you're responsible for that or they're not happy with the sport, and those that leave you and go somewhere else.

"ExxonMobil left, Tag Heuer left, Hugo Boss left. These are all companies that stayed in the sport, so what that tells you is they weren't happy with McLaren. Now, probably a lot of that was results driven. As you get into poor performance, if you're not a nimble, flexible, adaptable partner, then someone goes 'if this is all about buying and winning, I'm going to go to the team that's winning'."

Losing sponsors to Red Bull and Mercedes is indicative of the recent decline in McLaren's standing within F1. The challenge now is to find a way to reverse that trend, before it becomes a permanent feature.

"A great team like McLaren can survive a year or two, but these past few years - especially last year because we've gone backwards - it's been difficult," adds Brown. "We're going about working with partners in a new and innovative way. It's fortunate that because of my background, I've worked with all the teams, so I know their strengths and weaknesses and I'm current on those.

"What we've assembled at McLaren is a world championship team off-track. Now we just need to get our results back there - back to the McLaren that we all know, which is one of being a leader, being at the front of the field and being innovative, because I think we've become a bit 'me too' in the look and feel of the brand."

It is a sure sign of midfield mediocrity when your team is merely aping faster rivals and playing catch-up. But maybe, just maybe, there is something innovative for McLaren in becoming a 'me too' F1 team in certain respects.

For so long McLaren was all about trying to out-smart its rivals with clever ideas: from Adrian Newey's never-raced MP4-18, to the abandoned 'octopus' exhausts of 2011, or the rear suspension 'blockers' that were quietly shelved in 2014, to the much trumpeted 'size zero' packaging on the 2015 McLaren-Honda, which proved a development cul de sac for Honda's engine.

Since restructuring the technical team in 2014, racing director Eric Boullier has tried to move McLaren away from endless revolutionary attitudes to the regulations, aligning more closely with Red Bull's aerodynamic approach. Not exactly 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'; more a case of 'join 'em, then beat 'em at their own game'.

That's a pragmatic approach to take given Red Bull's relative success during McLaren's recent drought. The feeling now within McLaren is that it is back to producing aerodynamically sound cars that can develop properly through a season, rather than forcing itself to develop out of trouble each year - something that ironically affected Red Bull quite badly last season under F1's latest aero rule changes.

But there's no real doubt that Red Bull finished 2017 with one of the best chassis on the grid, if not the best. With McLaren and Red Bull both using Renault engines in '18, we will finally get to see how Boullier's McLaren stacks up technically.

"I've got a lot of confidence in Eric and the organisation," says Brown. "If you look at what he did at Lotus - winning races in a pretty unstable environment, not brilliantly funded, with drivers that people thought were tricky. Look at how happy Fernando is. I think he loves the McLaren environment. Eric and the whole leadership team is very strong. It's a real team environment."

Boullier admits the constant cycle of bitter disappointment created by the abortive Honda project damaged morale and threatened to dismantle his work, so it's probably a testament to the new working culture, the bold moves made to switch engines and do everything necessary to retain Alonso, and the residual historical pull of McLaren's status as the second most successful team ever in F1, that it hasn't "lost anyone that we didn't want to lose", according to Brown.

"I think it shows the passion of people at McLaren to work for McLaren, and the great job that Eric has done," Brown adds. "We've seen an immense amount of loyalty. I wouldn't use the word 'depressed'. I would use the word 'frustrated'. A frustrated, eager McLaren is a good place for McLaren to be. And there's lots of enthusiasm. People have five years of built-up frustration and that's healthy for the organisation.

"It's about getting all the pieces in place. Automotive is going great - we had a record year last year. The shareholders' situation has been resolved. When you put that all together, everything is headed in the right direction."

Looking ahead to 2018, there is little doubt McLaren's new partnership with Renault should yield better results, but the 'anything is better than Honda' mantra will only get the team so far. If McLaren-Renault finishes fourth in '18 that is obviously better than finishing ninth in '17 with Honda, but fourth is still nowhere near good enough for a team that exists to win.

McLaren will likely have the fourth-best car on the grid and has swapped the worst engine in F1 for the next worst. This move will alleviate some symptoms, but realistically this is about survival until 2021

But winning in this V6 era of F1 means dethroning Mercedes - a now mighty force with a bigger staff, a better car and a much stronger engine than McLaren can boast. Aligning with Honda was meant to be the innovation that returned McLaren to the front. Renault is improving gradually, but it's difficult to see the French manufacturer properly threatening Mercedes in the near-term, perhaps not until the engine rules change again for 2021.

"We know who won six of the last 13 [constructors'] championships, and they may be the third-best engine right now but they're still winning races," Brown counters. "They've won [races] every year since they started winning championships. Just because they maybe had the third best engine in Abu Dhabi, I wouldn't just take to the bank that they're going to be the third best engine forever. If Red Bull can win races, I don't see why McLaren can't win races."

Aiming to win races again would be a logical first step after such a protracted period of underachievement. Brown says McLaren is "very convinced" Renault is the right engine partner and expects fresh competition with Red Bull to "raise everyone's game". He also hopes McLaren's expertise can influence Renault's engine development, particularly the hybrid systems, though Renault F1 team boss Cyril Abiteboul thinks McLaren will have little sway until the final season of its current deal in 2020.

Questions also remain concerning Renault's ability to increase power without compromising reliability, or vice versa, as well as produce sufficient parts to supply three teams properly, following the cooling-related problems Toro Rosso suffered at the end of last season, which caused a very public spat between the Red Bull sister team and its former engine partner. Renault says it is taking steps to address these problems, but doubts will linger until Renault teams are fighting regularly with Mercedes, without recourse to strategic grid penalties.

Maybe Renault will match Ferrari and Mercedes this year; maybe McLaren will produce a better car than Red Bull, but it seems unlikely given F1's iterative nature under stable regulations. Ostensibly, McLaren will likely have the fourth-best car on the grid and has swapped the worst engine in F1 for the next worst. This move will alleviate some symptoms, but is unlikely to be a panacea. Realistically, this is about survival until 2021, when the engine rules will change again, commercial terms will be recast, cost-caps may come in, and F1's new owners will finally stamp their own mark on grand prix racing.

"I'd be surprised if we were world champions this year," says Brown. "Then again, no one thought Brawn was going to be world champion, so, you know, the sport can throw out. But that was a big rule change and they found something. With the rules stability now it's harder to find something.

"I wouldn't want to say we're not gonna try and win world championships before 2021, but certainly it's an un-level playing field right now, which makes it a tall task. The budget deficit is quite huge between us and the top three teams. You can spend more efficiently, as Force India does. Force India is beating teams that spend more, so it's not purely money, but the discrepancy is too big.

"Given the amount of change that is going to come in 2021, I think right now all we can do is focus on the next three years and stay very in-tune with what's going to happen. We used to have one of the biggest budgets in the sport, now we don't, so we need to find more budget and at the same time work real hard to get ready for the cost cap, which I think is gonna be a positive thing.

"When we get on equal footing [financially] with the other teams, I like our chances of winning world championships as much as anyone else."

Incidentally, cost capping is exactly the sort of thing Williams technical chief Paddy Lowe feels his team needs before it stands any real chance of making proper progress back towards the front of the grid. In the meantime, McLaren must also tread water to a certain extent, hoping that Renault can find a consistent level of performance that has proved largely beyond its reach since the current V6 engines were introduced.

Wherever Renault's 2018 engine sits compared to main rivals Ferrari and Mercedes, McLaren will be measured against Red Bull - one of F1's most successful teams since McLaren last won a championship - and Renault's own works outfit, which is coming up fast, determined to become a championship challenger in its own right. Can McLaren truly compete, or are its best days now firmly behind it?

"We've accomplished a lot in '17 that the viewers can't see on television," Brown says. "We're now one group, which makes us stronger. New leadership, restructuring, some investment into the team that we've not had the last few years. We weren't spending what we needed to, we weren't investing in the right areas. We've corrected that. We've got our two drivers that we wanted. We've got a lot of energy in the company. We've got new sponsors coming on-board.

"All that started to take shape in '17 so we can come out strong in '18. We've got drivers that can win. We've got the talent inside the organisation to win. What we need to do now is go on the racetrack to prove it. We need to get back to the front of the field, get back to our winning ways, and, ultimately, get back to winning championships."

This is undoubtedly the beginning of a new era for McLaren. A new broom has swept through the corridors of the McLaren Technology Centre, consigning the Ron Dennis age - McLaren's most successful period overall - to the annals of history. The team he built into a true force, then dragged into decline, now stands at a crossroads - between paths that may lead to bettering the glories of yesteryear or becoming a permanent ghost of its former self.

Brown is convinced McLaren can take the correct route. "I've been a massive McLaren fan since '88," he says. "I have always thought it's the best race team in the world, and has proven that many times.

"I still have that belief. I'm a massive believer in the team and in the people. The same people are still there. If you look at our facility, the people, the ownership, we've got all the right ingredients. Now we just need them to come together."

It's a self-belief mantra Williams has often repeated and is still yet to make good on. McLaren seems determined to avoid the same fate, seems structured to ensure a different outcome. But it's been a long time since McLaren last tasted proper success in Formula 1, and all the while the clock is ticking. McLaren must escape decline soon, or else surely suffer permanent damage.