02-03-2018, 23:29
http://www.bbc.com/sport/formula1/43246098
McLaren enter this season with high hopes of returning to relative competitiveness after three dismal years with Honda engines.
They have switched to Renault engines after losing faith with the Japanese company and have been talking about their expectation of being at least able to fight for podiums again.
But attaining a better engine comes with a flip side. McLaren's car can for the first time since 2014 be directly compared with those of other teams, in their case, Red Bull and Renault, both of whom have the same engine.
McLaren admit that this brings pressure but they say they welcome it.
Everyone in F1 accepted that the McLaren was a good chassis last year - although not many felt it was as good as McLaren themselves did. They regularly claimed it was in the general ballpark of the Red Bull.
No one who looked at the lap times drew that conclusion about McLaren this week.
McLaren's performance was especially hard to read because they spent the entire test running on the softest tyres, when most others focused on the soft and medium. This was a deliberate choice based on the weather forecast, McLaren thinking the softer tyres would work better in the cold conditions.
Stoffel Vandoorne set the third-fastest time of the test overall - 0.5secs slower than Hamilton's best - but he was using the softest 'hyper-soft' tyres to do that. There was no official tyre off-set in Barcelona. But at the post-season Abu Dhabi test of 2018-spec tyres, the hyper-soft was more than two seconds quicker than a soft.
Fernando Alonso
With Fernando Alonso comes F1's diehard fans
Fernando Alonso did his best, a 1:20.929, on the super-soft tyre. That's quite possibly a de facto quicker lap than Vandoorne's - but 1.6secs slower than Hamilton, who was using a tyre estimated by one team to be around 1.3secs slower.
With this as raw data, the impression up and down the pit lane was that - on the evidence of this week - McLaren have a lot of work to do.
But then it was their first test with a new engine supplier, they had some very public reliability issues - a wheel fell off on the first day; an exhaust clip broke causing significant overheating damage in the engine bay on the second - and may well have had others that were not known about. In that context, it could be that the car was running in a way that compromised its true performance.
In short, it would be wiser to wait before jumping to any conclusions about McLaren's performance.
McLaren enter this season with high hopes of returning to relative competitiveness after three dismal years with Honda engines.
They have switched to Renault engines after losing faith with the Japanese company and have been talking about their expectation of being at least able to fight for podiums again.
But attaining a better engine comes with a flip side. McLaren's car can for the first time since 2014 be directly compared with those of other teams, in their case, Red Bull and Renault, both of whom have the same engine.
McLaren admit that this brings pressure but they say they welcome it.
Everyone in F1 accepted that the McLaren was a good chassis last year - although not many felt it was as good as McLaren themselves did. They regularly claimed it was in the general ballpark of the Red Bull.
No one who looked at the lap times drew that conclusion about McLaren this week.
McLaren's performance was especially hard to read because they spent the entire test running on the softest tyres, when most others focused on the soft and medium. This was a deliberate choice based on the weather forecast, McLaren thinking the softer tyres would work better in the cold conditions.
Stoffel Vandoorne set the third-fastest time of the test overall - 0.5secs slower than Hamilton's best - but he was using the softest 'hyper-soft' tyres to do that. There was no official tyre off-set in Barcelona. But at the post-season Abu Dhabi test of 2018-spec tyres, the hyper-soft was more than two seconds quicker than a soft.
Fernando Alonso
With Fernando Alonso comes F1's diehard fans
Fernando Alonso did his best, a 1:20.929, on the super-soft tyre. That's quite possibly a de facto quicker lap than Vandoorne's - but 1.6secs slower than Hamilton, who was using a tyre estimated by one team to be around 1.3secs slower.
With this as raw data, the impression up and down the pit lane was that - on the evidence of this week - McLaren have a lot of work to do.
But then it was their first test with a new engine supplier, they had some very public reliability issues - a wheel fell off on the first day; an exhaust clip broke causing significant overheating damage in the engine bay on the second - and may well have had others that were not known about. In that context, it could be that the car was running in a way that compromised its true performance.
In short, it would be wiser to wait before jumping to any conclusions about McLaren's performance.
Fernando es de otro planeta