McLaren at the start of 2017: This Honda engine is rubbish

It's no secret that McLaren's 2017 season in Formula One was a disaster with Fernando Alonso struggling consistently with his car and it has since emerged that the team felt their Honda engine wasn't good enough early in the campaign.

Honda's partnership with the team has since been brought to an end, although they have signed a deal to provide engines for the Toro Rosso team in 2018.

As part of the Amazon Prime documentary entitled, Grand Prix Driver, the trials and tribulations of McLaren's 2017 season are detailed in full.

These repeated struggles and failures were shown on screen, giving fans an insight into just what went wrong over the course of the season.

The documentary cameras saw all the engine failures as well as giving a view on the eventual break-up between the two parties.

For Alonso himself, the Spaniard was often hamstrung by the lack of power and stability in his car and couldn't put in a credible challenge to the World Championship.

It was the third year of partnership between the Woking based team and the Japanese engine manufacturer and it was a disaster from the start of the year.

Initially the engine wouldn't start and then McLaren discovered that several key parts of their car wouldn't be completed in time for a test at Silverstone, as such the test had to be scrapped.

"The factory is slightly out of control," explained operations manager, Simon Roberts.

"I've never seen anything as bad as this."

Unsurprisingly the climax of the documentary is as chaotic as all the other failures, in the final episode the team takes the car to a test in Barcelona, there were then reliability issues with the fuel tank and then the internal combustion engine failed in the first two days.

After a particularly bad lap, the reaction of the McLaren garage is audibly one of fury.

"We can't do a test like this, this is a really f...ing bad engine," a team member admitted.

"This is a f...ing awful power unit."

After the outburst was caught on camera, the team's director of races, Eric Boullier, gave a rather more diplomatic assessment of proceedings before admitting his concerns over Alonso's future.

"The test was both physically and mentally painful," he intimated to Jonathan Neale.

"He's going to say goodbye, he won't stay here, I'm one hundred percent sure he won't stay."

Neale himself then makes clear that the partnership between Honda and McLaren will be cut short.

"As far as I'm concerned, McLaren has done its job," he confirmed.

"We now need to find a new path.

"We have to come up with a new plan."

Since then it has emerged that the team have signed a deal with Renault who will produce their engines for the coming campaign.

http://www.marca.com/en/more-sports/2018/01/30/5a70577c46163f48798b462d.html