How much has McLaren improved?

'Progress' has been the watchword for McLaren-Honda this year. That's mainly because the reformed alliance has not had much else to get excited about in the early stages of this Formula 1 season.

There was much talk ahead of the campaign about aggressive "size zero" car design and engine innovation, which would return a team that hasn't won a constructors' title since before the turn of the millennium to the top of the F1 tree.

Of course, Rome wasn't built in a day, and nor is going from 'zero' to 'hero' in F1 the work of a moment. But expectations of McLaren-Honda are sky-high, both internally and externally.

This is understandable when you consider this partnership defined McLaren's most successful period as a Formula 1 team in the late 1980s and early '90s. Fans of McLaren, of Honda, of Formula 1 in general are excited to see what can be done second time around.

No points yet for McLaren's all-star line-up © XPB

Five races in and there has been nothing to write home about in terms of results. McLaren-Honda possesses a world-champion driver line-up in Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button - with more F1 experience between them than any other combination on the grid - but so far neither has managed to qualify inside the top 10, or even come close to scoring a point.

For a team that finished fifth in last season's constructors' championship (and by this stage in that campaign had scored 43 points), that doesn't look like progress; it looks like a massive step backwards.

But the ultimate goal is not to finish fifth in the constructors' championship, or fourth, or third, or second. The aim is to win. To do that, McLaren felt it had to take several steps backwards in the short-term, in order to take the giant leap forward necessary to become champions again.

Eventually, everyone at McLaren-Honda will (rightly) be judged by the extremely high standards they have set themselves. But for now the question is one of the progress made since McLaren-Honda MkII first took to the track together in Abu Dhabi last November.

The results from this analysis are mixed. Overall, McLaren-Honda is closer to the outright pace than it was at the beginning of the year (Abu Dhabi is discounted because the interim MP4-29H did not complete a timed lap), and closer than it was at the first race of the season, but its deficit to Mercedes has actually fluctuated slightly from circuit to circuit since Australia.

Partly this can be explained by certain circuit characteristics suiting the MP4-30 better than others. Interestingly, the closest McLaren-Honda has actually come to making it through to Q3 was in Bahrain, where Alonso fell 0.426 seconds shy with an engine the team estimated was 0.4s down on Button's.

Alonso showed flashes of pace in Bahrain © XPB

Sakhir is a circuit that places a premium on straightline speed, traction and braking stability, rather than outright downforce. By contrast, Barcelona (where Alonso was almost a full second away from the Q3 cut-off) is more about outright downforce. This would suggest a lack of engine performance is only part of the reason why McLaren has been uncompetitive so far this year.

But it's also fair to say some of the gap is down to concerns over reliability. The Honda engine proved disastrous initially, and McLaren racing director Eric Boullier estimates the problems it suffered in testing (mainly related to electronics and the MGU-K) have put the alliance three months behind schedule in terms of development.

"In an ideal world we prefer to qualify for pole and blow up the engine somewhere, but if you do this after four races you have to start from the back!" he says. "So we had to be more conservative and cautious."

Reliability-wise things don't look particularly good on the surface. Only once (in China) has McLaren-Honda got both cars to the finish of a grand prix, while a pair of 11th places (for Button in Australia and Alonso in Bahrain) represents the best results the MP4-30 has managed so far.

Engine problems have been responsible for four of these five failures to finish (or start in the case of Kevin Magnussen in Australian and Button in Bahrain), while only Alonso's DNF in Spain (the result of a visor tear-off lodging in a brake duct) can be attributed to anything other than the power unit.

This doesn't make for happy reading, but in fairness McLaren-Honda's overall reliability has actually improved.

Collaboration between Honda and McLaren's own KERS experts has managed to stop the MGU-K breaking down so readily, and McLaren-Honda is a world away from the troubles that plagued its pre-season testing programme.

The trouble is that 'improvement' has not been drastic enough to allow significantly more performance to be extracted from the engine, and both Button and Alonso are already using the third of their allocated four engines each for the season.

That's not quite as bad as the situation at Red Bull-Renault, but it's not good. And Red Bull's cars are significantly faster at present...

Button's car spent most of the Bahrain weekend like this © LAT

Whichever way you slice it, McLaren-Honda's pace and reliability is nowhere near a match for Mercedes. As Button put it after Alonso and he qualified 13th and 14th in Spain, more than three seconds away from pole position: "I'd guess the Mercedes is quicker from the moment it exits the pitlane to the moment it comes back in!

"It's quicker everywhere; you can't put it down to one area," he adds. "They're just doing a fantastic job getting the maximum out of the regulations.

"We're quite a bit behind [in terms of laptime], but we're also behind in terms of experience - especially with the philosophy of this car and the PU as well."

So perhaps, at this stage at least, it's fairer to compare McLaren-Honda to the other midfield teams.

This graph shows that McLaren-Honda is outdeveloping all of its closest rivals bar Toro Rosso, which has generally shown very impressive single-lap pace over the first five races of the season.

Of course, catching the likes of STR, Force India, Sauber and Lotus, which operate on a fraction of McLaren-Honda's budget, is not the aim, but the comparison shows that McLaren is making steady, if unspectacular, progress.

"I think we have already [made] the best progress of the year since testing," argues Boullier. "We have a lot [more] to come, [but] we have to go step by step.

"Every race we bring some improvement. We have to keep working and keep believing in what we are doing.

"We will get there."

It's clear McLaren-Honda has a long way to go before it will be in a position to achieve its stated aims. Progress is there, but that progress is rendered fuzzy against the backdrop of a target that's always moving as rivals also find improvement.

As Ferrari found out in Spain, you can be catching Mercedes one minute and struggling to keep up with it the next, such is the standard of excellence at the front right now.

McLaren has decided to hurt its short-term prospects in order to reap the long-term benefit of once again being a works-engined team. That giant leap forward hasn't come yet. Maybe it never will. But it is at least (just about) moving in the right direction - with a few zig-zags along the way!

Alonso knows he has to be patient if he's to eventually win the third world title he craves. Fans of McLaren have had to wait even longer. They will need a little more of that patience for a while yet it seems.