How McLaren was found out in Australia

McLaren celebrated its best result since 2016 with Fernando Alonso's fifth place finish in Melbourne, but it still has a long way to go to catch Formula 1's big three.

Edd Straw Mar 28, 2018, 10:21 AM

Upd: Mar 28, 2018, 12:31 PM

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Schadenfreude is great fun if you aren't at the centre of it. After three years of McLaren blaming Honda for all its ills, many revelled in the once-great team's testing troubles. From the moment the wheels started to come off its pre-season, quite literally in the case of Fernando Alonso's incident on day one of running, the narrative turned. Suddenly it was McLaren being found out as the cause of all the Honda-era ills, as while in the back of a Toro Rosso, its old engine was magically reliable.

This was always a nonsense. It was clear the car was at least brisk enough to be in or around the front of the midfield battle, even though Toro Rosso's mileage seemed a miracle of such magnitude that it suggested McLaren had played a big part in the Honda reliability woes. The Australian Grand Prix disabused those notions, but McLaren has been found out in a very different way.