Why 2018 left McLaren with no one else to blame

It is one of the time-worn tropes of Hollywood storytelling, and a pillar of the classical three-act structure, that the hero of the piece must at some point be sorely tested and laid low. Whether delivered to rock bottom by accident or their own hubris, our hero then dusts themselves down and through some form of equally challenging self-improvement proceeds towards the resolution.

You might have thought that McLaren reached its nadir in 2015, when the team's much-vaunted new relationship with Honda delivered little in the manner of results, but plenty in the way of festering rancour. Then - after brief glimmers of hope in 2016 - '17 proved similarly wretched, costing the head of long-time figurehead Ron Dennis.

But surely by 2018 McLaren would at least be angling towards the proceedings of the third act... The marriage with Honda had been annulled, a new relationship with Renault set in train. The sunlit uplands were in sight.

No. 2018, assuredly, was the season in which McLaren touched unexpected - and often absurd - new lows.

The key plot point, as it were, played out over the course of three months from the Bahrain Grand Prix onwards.

Here a longstanding element of hubris was ruthlessly exposed: since 2015 McLaren's position had been that its car was good enough to challenge the top three, but was hamstrung by a gutless and unreliable engine. Switching to Renault power should therefore have generated an immediate competitive uplift. But it didn't.

"It [the shift to Renault] was our choice and in hindsight definitely the right thing to do in terms of reliability and performance," says McLaren chief operating officer Simon Roberts. "We did it at light speed - we just didn't want to miss winter testing.

"That's where the reliability started to suffer, because we didn't have time to really diligently go through the car-systems side of it - the integration. The engine had been reliable but our car wasn't, and that is something that was rooted in the late change."

That meant a new front-end aerodynamic concept that should have been introduced in Australia was delayed until the beginning of the European season. The team's form in Melbourne then flattered to deceive, as Fernando Alonso qualified 10th and finished fifth, and Stoffel Vandoorne raced from 11th to ninth.

Bahrain delivered what Roberts describes as "the big wake-up" as both McLarens qualified outside the top 10 - and, although both drivers salvaged points finishes, the speed deficit to the Honda-powered Toro Rossos was shaming. Pierre Gasly's STR13 finished fourth.

"Bahrain was really difficult," says Roberts, "and we started looking internally - have we got something wrong? Is it just a mistake?"

"Some aspects of the car were not going as intended," says performance director Andrea Stella. "At the same time, the Spain package was to come. In Spain and Monaco we had a decent performance - P8, P7 [on the grid]. We knew there was something to understand, but by Canada it forced us to face the reality that actually the car wasn't performing. After that we just consolidated and we got nowhere near Monaco and Spain."

If the messy divorce with Honda has an upside, it is that it delivered McLaren to a point where it had to interrogate its most basic assumptions - chief of which was that it was creating a brilliant car.

The MCL33 was an iterative development of the 2017 concept, which McLaren believed to be a competitive chassis. Time and again through the Honda era McLaren racing director Eric Boullier would insist that the cars were quick through corners and that GPS data backed up his claim.

Others, such as Autosport technical consultant Gary Anderson, weren't so sure. The McLarens generally seemed to be running more wing than rival cars, which would also account for at least part of that cornering performance - as well as of the straightline- speed deficit for which McLaren was so ready to blame Honda.

In fact, the 2017 concept had inherent weaknesses that had gone undetected and were now impeding development of the MCL33. New components didn't work as anticipated, or sufficiently ameliorate the car's main problems: chronic instability at the rear, and draggy aero that didn't deliver downforce consistently through corners.

"There's definitely a hunger. Nobody is sitting there saying, 'Hey! It's all OK!' We have to work on it day in, day out" - Gil de Ferran

"Coming from 2017 to the '18 car we wanted to keep developing the '17 baseline since it was a good car," says Stella. "We thought we were not changing very much but we tried to expand, to consolidate some concepts of the car. In hindsight, after lot of methodical investigation, we'd embedded some aero issues in the car, creating a bottleneck, making development of the car very difficult."

In Bahrain the cars had failed to perform under the very noses of the Bahraini royalty who are, through the Mumtalakat state investment vehicle, key shareholders. Over the following three months, as the scale of the problems became apparent on track, rifts also developed behind the scenes.

During the French GP weekend the Daily Mail published an excoriating takedown of McLaren's operations. A key management clique of so-called "untouchables" was roundly hated, it alleged, as was the jokey practice of rewarding staff with chocolate bars for hitting production targets.

Whether true or not, the story was enthusiastically uptaken and regurgitated by the shuffling horde of cut-and-paste internet bottom-feeders who attend the train of the F1 circus like Roman camp followers. In the regular FIA team principals' press conference, Boullier faced a barrage of questions concerning both confectionary and his own future. No, he said, he did not plan to resign.

Within two weeks, he had resigned.

Veteran senior engineer Tim Goss had gone in April, chief engineer Matt Morris quit in late July. Since the summer a new leadership team has been in place, comprising Gil de Ferran as sporting director, Stella as performance director (having been head of race operations), and Roberts. Former chief engineer Pat Fry - who left for Ferrari in 2010 - returned in September, and James Key will join from Toro Rosso as technical director at an as-yet-unspecified point (but too late to steer development of the 2019 car).

De Ferran brings considerable racing and managerial savvy, and he got a head start in getting to know what he calls "the characters" at McLaren by acting as a consultant during Alonso's Indianapolis 500 bid in 2017.

He has a lot on his plate, not least in establishing his leadership credentials in a large organisation with some big characters on staff - characters who have been with the team for many years and can boast their authorial stamp on championship-winning cars. Depending on who you speak to, Boullier either thumped the table too hard or not enough when dealing with such individuals.

"In general you grow more from recognising your own weaknesses than otherwise," says de Ferran. "We've spent quite a lot of time looking inwards and trying to recognise what we do well, what we can improve on. It's not all bad. There are a lot of strengths within the team, and there's a lot of talent across the organisation at every level. But there's no denying that this hasn't been a great season and we have to look inwards, trying to understand where we're weak, where we're strong, and where we need to change.

"There's definitely a hunger. Nobody is sitting there saying, 'Hey! It's all OK!' There's a lot of effort going into improving clarity across the organisation, improving processes, improving communication. We have to work on it day in, day out."

Finding the root of the problems has required the team to turn GP Fridays into an ongoing science experiment. At Suzuka in October both drivers griped that there had been no developments on the car since May. That's because many developments haven't worked as expected because of the "bottleneck" on the car, explains Stella, as well as the need for the team to rigorously evaluate its own processes.

"Even though we knew there were some areas that might be the culprit, it wasn't so obvious," he says. "So we had to conceive some tests to interrogate the entire car. It was a big effort in terms of experiments and tests with not necessarily what would have been raceable parts. And even if these tests provide clear answers, they can't necessarily be transformed and processed into something that can be developed for this year's car."

Development will continue to be difficult because the windtunnel at the McLaren Technology Centre is obsolete, and so 'baked in' to the building's structure that it cannot be brought up to the required standard. Under Dennis the company sought planning permission for a new facility that would house both the burgeoning McLaren Applied Technologies division and a new tunnel.

"If I start worrying about the future, how does that help me?" Gil de Ferran

But it was bounced by the planning authorities on account of its traffic impact, even though the scheme included an underground-transport system that team insiders dubbed the 'Ronorail'. McLaren has been using the Toyota windtunnel in Cologne, adding an unwelcome layer of complication and expense to the team's research processes.

Race operations may also need a tune-up. Alonso accused the team of "lacking ambition" in Russia, pushed back against a call to fit intermediate tyres during the German GP, and has generally been chippy and truculent in open communications with the pitwall.

A few years down the road, McLaren's principals might look back at this season as the turning point - where the team had to confront the proof of its own shortcomings and learn to be better. "We've left no stone unturned," says Roberts. But the route to the third-act redemption isn't direct, easy or obvious.

"I can't make predictions on where it ends," says de Ferran. "Our shareholders and board members have been very supportive. I don't know what the future holds. If I start worrying about the future, how does that help me? As a driver I never sat on the grid worrying about what-ifs, I just focused on the aspects I could control - getting through the first corner, how I was going to manage my tyres, and so on - and the results came.

"I just focus on what I can do today to change the short, medium and long-term. I focus on the process because I truly believe that when you do that," and he thumps the table for emphasis, "when you do the best job you can on the day, the future takes care of itself."

Right place, wrong time

For Stoffel Vandoorne there's one statistic he will never be able to escape. He was emphatically 'nilled' in qualifying by Fernando Alonso in 2018, beaten 21 times.

Vandoorne was also dropped by McLaren, the team that spotted his talent in his early days in the junior formulas and had supported him ever since. It was a sad way to end - or at least pause - an F1 career that had promised so much.

Despite that depressing qualifying stat, Vandoorne is much better than he has seemed. It's been a case of right place, wrong time. He was fantastically dominant in GP2 against some high-quality opposition but, even as he homed in on an F1 drive, circumstances turned against him.

He was impressive in a one-off drive substituting for Alonso in 2016, and could reasonably have expected the team to have improved by the time he made his full-time debut in '17. But it didn't, and Vandoorne was very much a product of the McLaren regime that was in the process of being ousted. When Zak Brown took charge he naturally brought in people with whom he had previously worked. Lando Norris, in whose management Brown has an interest, was always likely to get the nod for '19.

Equipped with difficult cars, Vandoorne struggled - overdriving at first in 2017, then getting closer to Alonso, then falling away again in the troublesome '18 chassis.

"Last year Stoffel was closer," says Andrea Stella, McLaren's performance director and long-time engineer to Alonso. "This year the window opened between them. Working with Fernando, the more difficult the car, the greater his [Alonso's] margin over his team-mate. The 2014 and '12 Ferraris were not easy cars."