McLaren: Fork in the road?

“Fork in the road” that’s how Zak Brown, Executive Director of McLaren has described the situation ahead of Canadian race a little over two weeks ago, and despite Alonso scoring the teams first points of the season at Baku, few seem excited at McLaren.

“Fork in the road” that’s how Zak Brown, Executive Director of McLaren described the situation ahead of Canada two weeks prior. And things only got worse for the team at that event. Honda’s planned engine upgrade for this weeks Canadian race, has been delayed.

Although only eight races into this season, Honda as an engine supplier, is, for the third year in a row, since its return to the sport, struggling for power and sitting firmly in at the bottom of the standings.

“I don’t want to get into what our options are. Our preference is to win a world championship with Honda,” Brown said when speaking with news agencies this week.

“But at some point you need to make a decision as to whether that’s achievable. And we have serious concerns. Missing upgrades, and upgrades not delivering to the level we were told they were going to, you can only take that for so long. And we’re near our limit.”

And he’s right, for three years Honda has failed, as an engine supplier to deliver on at of it’s promises. The engine can’t put out as much as a year old engine at times let alone a 2017 engine, leaving former world champion Fernando Alonso more and more frustrated and the team as a whole more and more frustrated too.

And while McLaren want to keep Alonso beyond this season, the flustered Spaniard has stressed he will only stay with the floundering team if they can truly show signs of being about to compete.

In 2015, it was McLaren who lured Honda back to the sport, with the intention of bringing back a pairing that made them one of the most dominant teams during the late 80’s and early 90’s, that saw them win several world championships together. But those days are a long behind them, and the last three years have seen the once winning combination, score only 105 points in total, with the team finally scoring their first batch of points at Baku, after eight races.

McLaren now need to look forward and to their future.

“It will come together,” Brown has promised “There’s lots of things that go into the decision and we’re entering that window now of ‘which way you go when you come to the fork in the road’.”

So what can McLaren do? Well realistically they have two options if they really want to compete in 2018. Go back to Mercedes, or team up with Ferrari. And the choice to be made is not just one for McLaren, but for the political hold on the entire sport. The simple option is to return to Mercedes and continue their long term partnership with the highly successful constructor. Or McLaren could side with Ferrari, and utilise the newly available name of Alfa Romeo, a name that has not been seen in the sport since the mid 1980’s.

But as positive as these steps could be, and more points would be scored on a more consistent and regular basis, the likelihood of a customer team beating a works team is low, and whoever McLaren side with next year, steps will be taken by either provider to ensure the works team aren’t shown up.