F1's Sleeping Giant Must Wake Up

The McLaren-Honda alliance has endured two difficult seasons, and must start delivering in 2017. But is it up to it?

- Ben Anderson

This surely cannot be allowed to go on much longer. McLaren is meant to be a top Formula 1 team, a perpetual championship challenger, a winning force – not a mediocre midfielder operating on a big team’s budget.

For an outfit that is statistically ranked as F1’s second most successful ever, behind only Enzo Ferrari’s great Maranello empire, McLaren’s recent record is utterly abysmal.

Its current winless run stretches back four seasons and 78 races. That is worse than its post-Ayrton Senna malaise of 1994-96, and comfortably outstrips the barren spell of 1978- 1981 (53 races) that marked McLaren’s pre-Ron Dennis nadir.

How long can the lands of its Woking headquarters endure such drought before they become scorched forever? Formula 1 expects better than this from McLaren. McLaren expects better than this from itself. Something has got to give – and soon. 

McLaren has already taken several steps to address this slump: making significant changes to its technical personnel and working culture, swapping customer Mercedes engines for a works Honda partnership, signing a double world champion driver in Fernando Alonso, and more recently pushing through its boardroom a new broom that has swept power away from Dennis’s hands.

McLaren has changed a lot during the past four years, but so far that change has not added up to success on track.

Honda is McLaren’s big gamble that is yet to pay off. There was much fanfare when this great alliance reformed ahead of the 2015 season, with talk of its proud winning history and daring ‘size zero’ innovations – tiny components that were meant to deliver big performance.