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Formula One mechanics like to work with music blaring out of the garages but the anthemic Things Can Only Get Better is probably too close to the bone to feature on any McLaren playlist.
How much better will things get, after the worst-ever season for the sport’s second most successful team and a disastrous opener this time round in Australia, is one of the big questions ahead of the race in Bahrain, the racing outfit’s ‘second home’.
McLaren, partly-owned by the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund Mumtalakat, winners of eight constructors’ titles and 12 drivers’ championships since their first in 1974, have not won a grand prix since 2012 and even refrained at the launch of their new car from making any prediction about when the drought might end.
Last year, the first of an exclusive new partnership with Honda, they finished ninth of 10 teams and scored just 27 points from 19 races – 16 fewer than world champions Mercedes scored on last season’s and this year’s opening weekend in Australia.
They also collected record grid penalties due to frequent engine failures. In Belgium alone, Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button were handed drops of 105 places between them – a meaningless but nonetheless eye-catching sanction on a grid made up of just 20 positions.
“I find it uncomfortable to watch these two great sportsmen struggling like that,” former McLaren driver Martin Brundle said of the two champions who won their titles with other teams.
“It’s just painful isn’t it? I can’t imagine what it’s like for them. They’re hard-wired to win championships and races. We all need that McLaren.
“Imagine if McLaren was really on form and we were talking about Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren. Then you’ve got a season on your hands, haven’t you? We need it.”
Alonso, the driver with the most career wins in Sakhir with three, crashed heavily last weekend, as reported in GulfWeekly, after tangling with Esteban Gutierrez’s Haas. He managed to extricate himself from the wreckage without assistance but said he felt lucky to be alive.
It was a disappointing day all round for McLaren, with Alonso’s team mate Jenson Button finishing 14th out of the 16 finishers.
If plenty of people are rooting for a McLaren revival – and their drivers are two of the most popular on Twitter with a combined 4.7 million followers – they need Honda to come up with a much more competitive power unit.
The initial signs were mixed, with the car managing to complete a reasonable number of laps in eight days of pre-season testing even if fewer than teams they would never normally consider as rivals.
However, McLaren hoped for a further step up for Bahrain with racing director Eric Boullier suggesting ‘massive progress’ had been made.
Honda had made big changes to the power unit, supposedly increasing reliability, but more performance is needed if McLaren are to challenge for podiums as well as points.
Neither Button, 36, nor Alonso, 34, have time on their side.
The Briton, who won his championship with Brawn in 2009, contemplated calling it a day last season while there was talk of the more mercurial Alonso taking a sabbatical if the car showed no signs of real improvement over the winter.
The Spaniard has ruled that out, saying last month that his motivation was high, but the former Ferrari driver has sounded disillusioned about the direction the sport as a whole has taken.
“The cars are too slow, they’ve taken all the joy out of driving,” the double champion, who endured seven retirements in 18 races last year.
Another season of being lapped by the Mercedes of triple champion Lewis Hamilton, a former McLaren team mate of both drivers, could tip him over the edge.
“I somehow think Jenson can handle it better than Fernando,” said Brundle, who had a year at McLaren in 1994 before retiring two years later. “Fernando has got the added misery of the Ferrari going so fast. The car he somehow navigated his way out of, took off the minute he got out of it,” added the Sky television pundit.
“Is he going to be fighting with a Manor? Not really is he? Can he be? Can they be fighting a Manor in the early stages of the season? How are they going to cope with that?”
