McLaren braced for troubled start

New Honda era, Alonso’s concussion part of F1 outfit’s troubles

LONDON: McLaren start the Formula One season in Australia with star signing Fernando Alonso absent and recovering from a concussion, a Honda engine that has yet to run smoothly and a car that has spent more time in the garage than testing on track.

Crisis? What crisis? The team’s racing director Eric Boullier, a Frenchman with enough sangfroid to match any English stiff upper lip, is certainly not about to panic even if others are already predicting a long, hard slog ahead.

“It’s true that we didn’t do as many laps as we wanted. It’s true that it’s going to hurt the development of the car... but we will recover,” he assured reporters at the end of the final pre-season test in Barcelona. “It’s not that negative or disappointing... all the systems on the engine are working, cooling is working. The base is exactly as per plan.”

McLaren, the second most successful team in the sport after Ferrari in terms of race wins, always knew 2015 would be a difficult year.

A new partnership with Honda, the Japanese engine manufacturer that powered the team in some of their greatest years with Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, may take McLaren back to the summit but it was sure to encounter teething problems along the way.

Even with the dominant Mercedes engine on board last year, McLaren still failed to win a race and have not won a championship since Lewis Hamilton’s first in 2008.

“Of course we’re prepared for a steep learning curve,” said Spaniard Alonso in January when the tightly-packaged new car was presented.

“You don’t expect to be at the top of the mountain the day you start climbing,” added group head Ron Dennis at a launch in Tokyo last month. 

Published in The Express Tribune, March  7^th,  2015.

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