F1 column: McLaren season already a write-off

“It is the worst season in McLaren’s history. Their biggest issue is that they are so far off where they need to be."

F1 column: McLaren season already a write-off

“It is the worst season in McLaren’s history. Their biggest issue is that they are so far off where they need to be, that it looks as though a clean sheet of paper is required to start again. I’m not sure how achievable that is. 2015? You can forget it.”

This is the damning verdict of Allan McNish, Briton’s former Formula One driver and three-times Le Mans winner, when asked to describe McLaren’s season.

After eight races, the British team, winner of a combined 20 drivers’ and constructors’ championships, have scored just four measly points. Only Manor, the outfit who scrambled together something resembling a Formula One car at the eleventh hour just to take part in the 2015 campaign, are below them in the championship.

While Jenson Button finished eighth at the Monaco Grand Prix to secure the British team’s only points’ finish of the campaign so far, his team-mate Fernando Alonso has zero, zip, zilch, nada.

His record this season reads: DNS, DNF, 12th, 11th, DNF, DNF, DNF, DNF. This is so far removed from what he – and most of the paddock – anticipated when he quit Ferrari to re-join McLaren, that it is almost laughable. Almost.

The Austrian Grand Prix, where the double world champion crashed out after a collision with Kimi Raikkonen on the opening lap, marked his fourth consecutive retirement.

Never before in his previous 242 grands prix starts has he suffered the indignity of failing to reach the chequered flag in four straight races. Not even in his debut season when he was plodding around the back of the field in a notoriously unreliable Minardi. The worst it got then was three.

Of course, Alonso is unlikely to retire from a race in more bizarre circumstances than on Sunday. He was a passenger as Raikkonen lost control of his car before banging wheels with the McLaren and launching the Spaniard against the barriers and on top of his Ferrari.

But after he and team-mate Button served a somewhat farcical 50-place grid penalty between them as a result of Honda’s poor reliability, who is to say he would have made it to the finish anyway? Indeed Button was forced to park his McLaren after just nine laps.

Yet Alonso, whose positivity along with team-mate Button ranges from the admirable to the absurd, believes McLaren are set to turn a corner.

Speaking to his native Spanish reporters after arguably the worst grand prix weekend of the British team’s trophy-laden history, Alonso said: “The path we have taken is good. I know what’s coming, and I know that things are going to change quickly now. I do not know if it will take two, six or eight races, but no more than that. The crisis is over.”

But what else can Alonso do? Perhaps he has to preach positivity to feel at ease with his own mind. It is no secret that he angled a move away from Ferrari in the latter stages of last season in a bid to usurp Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes.

But while Hamilton secured the world championship – and then signed a new three-year deal with Mercedes worth the best part of £100million – and Sebastian Vettel penned an equally lucrative contract to replace Alonso at Ferrari, the Spaniard was left with little choice than to join McLaren, the team he left so acrimoniously in 2007.

Alonso expects McLaren to be on the road to recovery within eight races; that takes us to the Mexican Grand Prix in November. So, let us re-evaluate he and McLaren then. One thing’s for sure their fortunes cannot get any worse in the meantime.

************

Christian Horner has described suggestions he was on the brink of being sacked on the morning of the Austrian Grand Prix as “total rubbish”.

It was claimed that Gerhard Berger, the 10-time grands prix winner and compatriot of Red Bull’s billionaire owner Dietrich Mateschitz, was being lined up to replaced the Briton.

Yes, Red Bull are in the midst of a poor season. And yes, they’re probably pinning too much blame on engine supplier Renault for their decline.

Indeed, it’s worth mentioning that Max Verstappen, in a Toro Rosso, powered by Renault, finished ahead of both Daniel Ricciardo and Daniil Kvyat in Spielberg on Sunday.

But we should not forget that Horner, who joined as team principal in 2005, led the team to four consecutive drivers’ and constructors’ championships on the spin. Perhaps the outspoken Mateschitz should be reminded of that remarkable feat, too.

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