McHonda wrote: ↑08 Mar 2018, 00:49
What I mean is I'm having a hard time imagining the following..
Honda-We can sort it all out by making it a few CM longer.
McLaren-No,. but we'll swap to a bigger PU anyway and lose 75m a year on top of that instead, but thanks for the offer.
I suppose in a healthy partnership, the dialog could be indeed that simple. The problem of McLaren and Honda are of more complex nature:
This is my take:
#1
You have a chassis-aero team (McLaren) that wanted an exclusive-works-partnership with an engine manufacture, because they didn't want to fit in an PU designed for another car other than theirs. They wanted their own customized engine, designed exclusively for them and their car.
#2
You have an engine manufacture (Honda) that came late to party, on the backfoot, competing against other manufacturers who started development of these highly complex engines years in advance. Not only that, but they also entered a working relationship with a team that had very specific demands on what they wanted.
#3
Shared leadership. Who overseas the entire project? A car is always going to be tradeoff of sorts. You trade size, power, cooling requirements for aero performance. There is weight. There is reliability. Cooling. Give both parties carte-blanche and both end up with parts not designed for the other. The engine either compromises the aero or the aero compromises the engine.
On some level, Honda was the one re-entering F1. They didn't have current F1 experience and with McLaren having lots of it from 2014 when they were running the Mercedes unit, they probably had very specific design goals in regards to aero and chassis. On some level, I think it's also clear that McLaren were happy to trade off engine-performance by pursuing/imposing a size-zero concept that they were hoping to equal out or more with superior aero efficiency.
For a multitude of reasons, this never worked out. Honda realized that these engines are far more complex than anticipated. The performance wasn't there and the tightly built chassis wasn't helping reliability either. With the token system in place, they also struggled big time to make quick adjustments to their engine and solve the issues. I'd assume some of these issues carried over to 2016 and 2017.
At some point, Honda obviously wanted to make adjustments to the engine which would impact the aero and chassis of the car. Probably at that point, these alterations were not possible anymore without big changes to the design choices McLaren had already made. And of course with the problem of shared leadership, you have two parties pursuing different goals. McLaren wanted to make the best possible car and Honda the best possible engine. One of them had to concede to the others wishes. In an ideal working environment, you have one making that decision and both making trade-offs to fit the overall design goal. I suppose this just wasn't possible anymore for McLaren and Honda, with the history of failing and lack of communication and perhaps trust in each others ability. And Honda lacked their own experience with these highly complex performance units to know exactly what design roads to pursue for the best possible engine for these type of F1 regulations. They needed this experience just as much to grow from it and know from 1st hand where to invest and develop their engine.
Hence the working relationship that now exist with RedBull (Torro Rosso) is off to a great start. Torro Rosso probably have less of an aggressive approach, because they're already accustomed from fitting a customer engine. They effectively designed their car around the engine they are given. Changing to Honda gives both a new situation to deal with and can therefore be way more accommodating to each others wishes and limits.
My two cents.
