It's been a miserable start to year for the return of McLaren-Honda, but just how bad will it be? Place your bets. Im counting it as the lap on which the last McLaren retires. As a side question, will they get lapped on track? (note this requires them to both be slow enough and last long enough).
Tough to choose between DNQ and DNS, but I reckon the FIA will let them race and then they will stall on the way to the grid.
Oh dear, can we put today's performance down to Friday 13th? No, of course not. Can K-Mag even drive the thing? No, of course not. But Button's nothing if not a trouper so I'm going for an optimistic 30-39. He'll probably get lapped by this point but whether that's by the entire field depends on whether everyone's racing. I'm hoping for better, obviously; it's a sad state of affairs.
McLaren have the brand power to get onto the grid even if they stumble on 107%. How far will they go, I think quite far, Manor and Sauber have issues so just finishing could bring points, albeit very slow and steady points!
I think they will surprise everyone and both cars will be quicker than expected, Both cars will do 20 laps and retire within a lap of each other. That said, yes, they look awful from the outside at the moment, but i assume they are still not running full power (if they are and are that slow in a straight line, that's a huge worry). And their pace (assuming they are just trying to get mileage with the engine running at 75%) actually isn't terrible by any stretch. Might sounds silly, but i was actually almost impressed that they weren't too far off other teams towards the back at such an early stage of their techs development.
Even if they both only make half race distance, it's not a disaster. Honda were never going to just jump back in and be with the top of the pack. It will at least be a couple of seasons before they're really able to think about challenging at the top imo, which is a reasonable target.
I'm still pretty sure they are only running 70% power, needing to sort their mapping out etc, but the worrying signs were the drivers both really, really pushing on the softs, on low fuel and Kmag was still 3 tenths off Ricciardo, who set his lap on mediums....with fuel....not really pushing too much. Yikes. That means with the gap between the tyres consistently a second-1.2 seconds a lap difference, and fuel adjusted, they are currently around 2 to 2.5 seconds a lap off the teams who are another 1 second off of Mercedes..... Or to put it another way, the gap between them and Sauber needing closed is roughly the same gap as Williams and Ferrari have to Mercedes. Scary. Their nearest competitors are Force India, who are still half a second ahead. But that proves it's purely the lack of running and immature tech/mapping etc. Their estimates of being competitive are overly optimistic, Start of the European season? are they really going to find 2 to 2.5 seconds a lap, not including whatever the rest find between now and then, which will likely be another 5 or 6 tenths. So they need to find 3 seconds between now and Europe? Not happening.
It almost looked like McHonda are not running any electrical power! Maybe that is their quick fix for the cause of Alonso's accident?
Perhaps not all that far off the truth. Maybe not because of the Alonso incident though. But they were definitely not running anywhere near full power, it was very visible how slow they were off of the last corner and audible how rough the thing sounded coming off the power and going back on, there's no way their ers was running anything other than they minimum they could run.
The beeb had a nice comparison of Hamilton and Button's quali laps, and acceleration was the key difference. I'm curious what the difference in apex speeds were, I suspect dramatically less than the difference in speed at the braking point.
It stinks because it was ****. Honda need to sort it out and quick before their board pulls the plug like they always do when things go bad.
I'm just keen to know at this point whether McLaren even have a competitive aero package, we've no idea if their car is any good since they're having so many issues with the power unit. It looks nice, and often nice looking cars are fast cars but it all remains to be seen.
I can't believe how few sponsors they have. Mind you after todays performance they are unlikely to get any more. Hop they can sort the pu out quickly.
Well, Button was able to keep Perez behind him for most of the race, but that 5-second gap to Mercedes can't all be down to the engine...
