How much trouble is McLaren-Honda in?

There were high expectations when McLaren unveiled its 2017 challenger, but things looked decidedly familiar after the difficult first week of Formula 1 testing.

- Ben Anderson

This is a big season for McLaren-Honda. Two years into the troubled return of this famous alliance to Formula 1, it’s high time it started consistently delivering the performance to suggest that it can carry the fight to the championship’s big guns.McLaren-Honda arrived at Barcelona with expectations of producing a chassis that can rival the best teams on the grid – Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari – mated to a redesigned engine that’s supposed to be able to at least match the level Mercedes reached by the end of last year, which is reckoned to be about 80bhp up on where Honda got to with its 2016 power unit.

The talk has been of renewal – new regulations, new car,new name, new livery, new engine, new management. A clean break with the past. Time to get serious. But after four days of pre-season testing, it already looks as though McLare- Honda is seriously struggling.

The first two days were pretty much written off by engine problems. A fault with Honda’s oil-tank design lost Fernando Alonso his first morning in the car, requiring an engine change and the shipping of the faulty unit back to Japan for analysis, before Stoffel Vandoorne suffered a significant combustion-engine failure on Tuesday. Two days and two engines down, only 69 laps on the board,and not even a proper run among them, according to Vandoorne.

Like all manufacturers at the first pre-season test, Honda ran its new power unit in a detuned state. It’s not concerned by the need to modify the oil tank, but is worried that the second failure could have serious consequences when it comes to extracting further performance from the engine, an updated Melbourne-specification of which was originally due to arrive for this week’s second test.