Fury through the years: Fernando Alonso’s criticism shows how chronically bad McLaren have become

Fernando Alonso’s frustration with the struggling McLaren-Honda car seems to have reached the boiling point. Three races and three retirements into the season, the Spaniard is becoming increasingly vocal against the new engines.

At the Bahrain Grand Prix last weekend, he was heard complaining on the radio, as he was rapidly over taken by cars more than a hundred meters behind him, despite his gutsy driving.

“I’ve never raced with so little power in my life,” Alonso was heard complaining over team radio about the troubled Honda engines. “How the hell can they overtake me? Three hundred meters behind me at the beginning of the straight,” he added.

When told about a possible strategy change, he responded unenthusiastically saying, “Do whatever you want, mate.”

Ultimately, Alonso was forced out of the race as well due to engine trouble, adding to the team woes after Stoffel Vandoorne didn’t even start the race after the fourth Honda MGU-H failure of the weekend, and subtweeted his team on race day.

Even before his forced retirements in 2017, Alonso has not enjoyed success in his second coming at McLaren, having failed to reach the podium since rejoining the team in 2015. And that is a thought that must be weighing down the 35-year-old as he sees his former team Ferrari usurp the dominant Mercedes in the standings. In fact, McLaren, who are statistically the second most successful team in F1, are last in the Constructors’ Championship this season.

‘It feels like GP2’

This is not the first time Alonso has hit out at the Honda engines. Back in 2015 during his return season, Alonso had publicly complaining about the lack of power in his car, comparing the Honda power unit in the McLaren to a GP2 engine at the Japanese Grand Prix.

“It feels like GP2. Embarrassing. Very embarrassing. I’ll do my best...,” he was caught saying on the team radio. But that was a one-off incident, nothing compared to the steadily mounting criticism this year.

In 2017, even before the failures at the Australian GP and Chinese GP, he had made it clear that the McLaren-Honda cars this season are not up to the mark.

At the season-opening Australian GP, Alonso was in the running for points as he hovered around the 10th spot, before being overtaken by Force India rookie Esteban Ocon. He was later forced to retire with a suspension issue, while Vandoorne was the last of the drivers to finish.

I was driving one of my best races so far and we were surprisingly in the points all race long,” Alonso told Sky F1, “In normal conditions on a normal circuit we should be last and second last.”

“We had to do a huge fuel-saving which was hurting us a lot but we managed to keep the position. It was a surprise to be so high but at the end we couldn’t finish and we need to be more competitive soon,” Alonso had concluded.

‘We need to drive around the engine’

However, McLaren-Honda were nowhere close to competitive in the next race in China, and Alonso himself said that unless the engine improves, he couldn’t do much.

“It’s going to be difficult for us this year, as long as the engine doesn’t improve,” Alonso told Autosport ahead of the Chinese GP

“It’s not [only] power, it’s many things - it’s reliability, it’s fuel saving, and there are a lot more implications in the driving that we cannot drive normally, because we need to drive around the engine. It’s quite difficult, it’s quite hard now, to drive the car,” he was quoted as saying.

“You cannot do any mistake for the whole race, because any mistake in one corner in the next straight they will overtake you with the speed difference – you need to do zero mistakes. I don’t think we are lacking deployment, compared to the opposition, it’s just we have less power, so our time on the straights is much longer than the rest,” he explained.

In China, he qualified 13th, a huge achievement given McLaren’s expected problems at the gruelling Chinese GP. He didn’t let the opportunity to take potshot go by after, “In the end, 13th is the divine present,” he was quoted as saying.

During the race, Alonso drove like a beast – from 13th, he climbed to eighth and by lap 10 he was up to seventh, just 9 seconds off the lead. However, during a overtaking move on lap 33 with Carlos Sainz, technical problems struck and he was forced to retire after a fantastic display of driving. No wonder, Alonso is up in arms against the new Honda engine.

This is the same driver who had, back in 2015, expressed his excitement to race with the Honda engine. “After one difficult season, as I said, I learn so much. I enjoy working with McLaren, with , with all the Japanese discipline and Japanese culture into the team. I still remain very positive,” Alonso had said. However, the positivity has all but drained out now.

‘To have 5th, 7th or 9th in Monaco will not change my life”

Alonso’s disillusionment with McLaren’s was evident when he decided to skip the prestigious Monaco GP to participate in the Indianapolis 500. But it was his comments when he announced this decision that gave an insight into just how cynical he is of the team’s chances, saying that struggling McLaren made it easy to miss Monaco.

“It’s great to have some points but I have won there a couple of times already and I am a two-times world champion so to have fifth, seventh or ninth in Monaco will not change my life. In a way it is impossible to compare – to have the minimum chance to win the Indy 500 compared with fifth or sixth in Monaco, the other possibility is much bigger,” he was quoted as saying by The Guardian.

‘A step forward in my career after the two championships’

However, Alonso had something very different to say when the previous season ended. The McLaredn driver was so confident, he called his 2016 season better than his world title years.

Even at the end of the 2015 season – his first at Mclaren – he had a far more optimistic outlook, despite the lack of wins.

“Well, tough year - obviously difficult and struggling with the pace all year and the reliability, so definitely a difficult season for us,” Alonso had said when asked to sum up his 2015 campaign. “But personally I think it was necessary.

“It was a step forward in my career after the two championships, after five fantastic seasons fighting for the world championship but arriving second, so I needed some new motivation, some new project that I could trust and I could believe is the only way to become champion again,” he was quoted as saying by the official F1 website.

Alonso coming to McLaren for motivation would have been incongruent statement even then, as the two had not enjoyed the best of relationship. The two-time world champion first joined McLaren in 2007, as the reigning world champion but the partnership lasted only one year, before he returned to Renault with whom he had won his world championships. In his time there, he missed by just a single point, racing alongside an aggressive Lewis Hamilton.

He joined Ferrari in 2010, but could replicate his championship success there either and he eventually left his seat at the traditional F1 giants to return to McLaren-Honda partnership in 2015, in the hope of rebuilding the team and achieving the elusive third world title. However, it has been downhill from there – Alonso who had finished as championship runner-up in three of his five seasons with Ferrari, finished 16th with just 11 points with McLaren. The Spaniard, who had signed a three-year contract, continued to race though, despite the growing disillusionment, which all came to head in Bahrain.

With a marked disinterest in the team anymore, and an inclination miss a race for other racing competitions, Alonso has sounded a clear alarm – if the McLaren-Honda cars don’t sort out their engine trouble, they will not only lose out on Alonso, the driver but also Alonso, the fierce competitor who has performed as best as could with an under-performing car.