Why McLaren risks long-term failure

McLaren-Honda's terrible results in Formula 1 are regularly making headlines at the moment, but in truth the team has been on a relatively poor run for several seasons now.

Sport is always a sequence of highs and lows, but a sustained run of failure can be enormously damaging for F1 teams, particularly when commercial arrangements mean their budgets are directly affected by what happens on track.

This is a pain Williams knows all too well. Sir Frank's much-loved outfit was on top of the world several times in the 1990s, before Renault quit the category and Adrian Newey left for Woking. Things have never quite been the same since.

There was a brief revival thanks to a BMW works engine partnership in the early 2000s, including a genuine title challenge with Juan Pablo Montoya in 2003, but until last season the third most successful squad in Formula 1 history in terms of race wins hadn't finished higher than fourth in the constructors' world championship since that '03 campaign.

That's more than a decade without achieving the sort of major success that is necessary to remain a big fish within F1's vicious and uncompromising piranha tank.

After its messy divorce with BMW in 2005, and before it joined up with Mercedes for the beginning of the V6 era last year, Williams flitted between various customer engine deals with Cosworth, Toyota and Renault, managing to win a single race (Pastor Maldonado's opportunistic triumph in Spain in '12) and at best finish fourth in the constructors' championship in '07.

In six seasons as a works partner with BMW, only once did Williams finish lower than that...

Williams fell down the order and through customer deals after its BMW split... © XPB

If you go on for too long without achieving in the manner to which your team has become accustomed, the big problem is that eventually you have to cut your competitive cloth accordingly.

"It's a vicious circle," Williams deputy team principal Claire Williams tells Autosport. "The fewer sponsors you get in because your performance is bad, the less budget you have to go racing; the less budget you have to go racing, [the more] you have to make your money work harder and smarter for you.

"For any team, sponsorship and performance are inextricably linked, so whenever you're not performing on the track, inevitably your team as a sponsorship proposition isn't where you'd want it to be.

"But if you sink into even greater decline, then [with] the budget you have you aren't going to be able to build as competitive a race car as you'd like to build."

More worrying, perhaps, than the necessary budget cuts and downsizing a team will have to go through in this scenario (even if the fundamental infrastructure remains), is the potential for a poisonous change in culture and mindset, which can seep its way into the key element of the company - namely the employees.

Once you stop achieving like a top team, your people can stop believing you're a top team. Eventually you will cease to be a top team.

"You have to be realistic about your position," Williams adds. "There's a culture within [some] teams where they have a big-team mentality, and that's great because it can propel you forward. You always have to believe you're a team that can compete.

"But inevitably your on-track success dictates how you feel about how your culture within your team, so if you're not doing well of course you're not going to feel like a great big successful team.

...and then had to rebuild its culture after its difficult years, Claire Williams admits © LAT

"But in order to turn things around you need to make sure everyone within your team still believes they can win. That's absolutely critical. Otherwise, what's the point in turning up at the race track?

"Leadership is crucial. Every employee needs to know that the people in charge are doing the right things. After that period of decline, we had to do a lot of work around the culture of Williams, and people's mindsets.

"We had to communicate, in a very honest and transparent way, about where we had gone wrong, but what steps we were putting in place to affect change."

Williams is currently enjoying a mini-revival, thanks in no small part to the hard work of its revamped technical team under the wise guidance of former Benetton/Renault title winner Pat Symonds, and the strength of engine supplier Mercedes in the current V6 hybrid turbo formula.

But in reality it is punching well above its weight against better-funded 'factory' outfits like Mercedes and Ferrari, and 'preferred' Renault customer behemoth Red Bull.

McLaren hasn't won a constructors' title since 1998, but given its budget and infrastructure - and more successful recent track record in the world championship - it should really be ahead of Williams too.

However, McLaren's tactical decision to terminate its customer relationship with Mercedes, in order reunite with Honda in a 'works' partnership, has so far proved disastrous in terms of performance and results.

McLaren's lean start to life with Mercedes was fourth in the 1995 constructors' race © LAT

McLaren's present situation recalls the woes of 1994-96, which were also largely engine related. Frustrated at being behind Benetton in the pecking order with Ford, Ron Dennis did a deal with Peugeot for '94, which proved disastrous in terms of reliability.

Snatching a works Mercedes deal from Peter Sauber for 1995 eventually paid off, but only after two winless campaigns, and even during that entire three-season spell McLaren was still competitive enough to record 16 podiums and finish fourth in the championship every year.

After that, of course, McLaren went on to dominate for a few seasons, and obviously the hope is that it can do the same with Honda.

But the Japanese manufacturer is not performing as well as hoped or expected so far, and the present competitive situation - without a win since the final race of 2012 and set to finish ninth in this season's constructors' race - must be worrying for McLaren.

Racing director Eric Boullier has already admitted the team will take a financial hit next year because of such gross underperformance in 2015. Its own forecast projected it would match last year's fifth-place finish.

The question is: how long can it reasonably withstand this pain if Honda cannot dig itself out of a big ERS-shaped hole?

"I promise you, we will not finish ninth next year," Boullier tells Autosport confidently. "In terms of resource, for McLaren-Honda it's not a concern."

Including its last two Mercedes years, McLaren has not won a GP since 2012 © LAT

But the fact remains that it has ditched the best engine in F1 for comfortably the worst, and the longer that situation continues, the more likely McLaren is to morph from one of F1's big fish into one of its midfield minnows.

Boullier is right to point out the key difference between McLaren and Williams right now, in that his team is a works partner with Honda while Williams remains a customer outfit.

Williams's dark period began when it lost its works status, so perhaps McLaren won't really find itself in a hole unless Honda simply cannot improve and that relationship breaks down.

Red Bull and Renault were never properly tied together in quite the same way, but their sad tale of estrangement is another warning of what could lie ahead...

After losing its works status, Williams spent almost a decade in the doldrums, battling its way back from a dark detour off the glorious path. Can McLaren avoid the same fate?

The Woking team believes it is "impossible" to win the world championship without being powered by a works engine; Williams thinks differently. The next few seasons will reveal who has the clearest of the crystal balls, but for now it's Williams that's getting the job done on track, and we all know that results are what really count in this business.

So it's down to McLaren and Honda to get their collective act together, and make sure results improve.

If they don't, and they pull apart rather than together, the recent history of one great British F1 team should act as a clear warning of what could lay in store for another.

McLaren remains entirely self-confident for now, but needs to be wary that a few seasons of struggle doesn't transform into a decade of pain.

In this week's edition of AUTOSPORT magazine, BEN ANDERSON attempts to unravel the problems that have struck - both this year and in recent seasons - to prevent the reformed McLaren-Honda living up to expectations, culminating in what is set to be McLaren's worst constructors' championship finish since 1980.