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McLaren feared losing staff over Honda struggles

McLaren racing director Eric Boullier has confessed he feared key staff leaving the team in its third year of troubles with Honda.

McLaren racing director Eric Boullier has confessed he feared key staff leaving the team in its third year of troubles with Honda in F1.

In January 2014 Boullier was appointed racing director at McLaren under Ron Dennis and has spent the past three years restructuring the team and getting in new personnel. The McLaren chief says when it was clear the team would stumble for a third consecutive year due to an underpowered and unreliable Honda power unit at pre-season testing he held crisis talks with the senior management to resist a mass departure of key staff due to poor results.

Boullier says McLaren's split from Honda ultimately came down to "business reasons" and is relishing a brighter 2018 with customer engines from Renault. McLaren confirmed its switch to Renault at the Singapore Grand Prix with Toro Rosso picking up Honda as its power unit supplier from next season.

"I went to the management, showed them the data and told them that we cannot accept another year like this," Boullier said. "We had a tough first year with Honda, we had a tough second year, and had expected progress good enough to get us back to where we belong - but Barcelona showed that we would go backwards and that was absolutely not an option.

"I warned them about the consequences of another year of no results, where you keep everybody afloat. We have a new team, which has been reconstructed in the last three years: new people, very good new people - competitive people who used to win - and the danger was we'd lose them. The perception of a team is still very much based on drivers, because they are the faces of the team, but for me the real danger was losing those people. That was the discussion at the very beginning of the season.

"Any big decisions are always difficult to take. The concept of McLaren winning with Honda was a dream for everybody, yes - it was a beautiful story. Today we have huge respect for them and we definitely don't divorce with fights and screams and finger pointing. We are all very professional - and in the end it was a business decision, which they understand. Now we have to see that we get back to competitiveness - back to the top."

McLaren's best results during its Honda partnership between 2015 and 2017 were a trio of fifth place finishes all scored by Fernando Alonso - 2015 Hungarian Grand Prix, 2016 Monaco Grand Prix and 2016 United States Grand Prix.

Zdroj: crash.net