McLAREN and Honda are heading for a bitter breakup.
The Woking-based team are close to 1,600 days without a single victory in F1 and have not won a constructors’ championship since 1998.
During that time they have had to painfully watch their prodigy, Lewis Hamilton, join Mercedes and enjoy runaway success.
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It is an unthinkable amount of time given their whopping £400million budget.
And now relations between the F1 team and their Japanese engine suppliers are heading for meltdown.
McLaren have been left frustrated after Honda have failed to deliver a reliable and powerful engine over the past THREE years.
The understrength motor means their star drivers, including two-time world champion Fernando Alonso, who is paid £25million a year, cannot be competitive.
SunSPORT understands that McLaren are now looking at ditching Honda altogether after investigating the option of returning to Mercedes power THIS SEASON.
They could also PAY Honda to exit from their current contract and GIVE the engine deal to hard-up Swiss team, Sauber.
It would be an incredible and costly switch and one that would see a remarkable U-turn on the decision made by Ron Dennis in May 2013, the team’s ex-chairman, to side with Honda.
On Saturday night in Melbourne, the team’s current Racing Director, Eric Boullier, swerved questions about the move back to Mercedes.
Instead, the Frenchman, who flies from London to Tokyo once a week to make a personal check on Honda’s progress, decided not to comment.
But perhaps more worrying for Honda is that their engine chief, Yusuke Hasegawa, was not aware of McLaren’s conversations with Mercedes.
When quizzed he said: “It is just rumours…I don’t care. We have to concentrate on what we have to do.”
He eventually conceded they have failed to deliver this season and added: “We didn’t do a great job.”
However, former McLaren driver, David Coulthard, has delivered a scathing attack on the F1 team and says can have no excuses about their own failures and for picking Honda in the first place.
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He added: “For a team that prides itself on paying attention to detail across all areas, how did they leave a Mercedes contract early to accept a Honda power unit, which is so far away from what they had?
“They’ve lost sponsors, they’re in a spiralling downward effect. Honda still don’t have a handle on it and they can say ‘others started earlier’ or whatever but no one’s interested in excuses.
“If you enter the boxing ring you can’t say you didn’t have enough time to train at this weight. No one forced you to go in there.
“They made bad choices and it’s sad to see because they’re such a historic team but until Honda deliver proper power they’re not going to deliver anything, and they’re not on the right track at the moment.
“This is the third season of Honda so they probably made that decision five or six years ago?
“You can hope it will eventually be ok but if you look at Honda, the last time they were in F1 with the V8s they weren’t particularly successful.
“Jenson got one win but that team came alive when they put a Merc in the back of it when it became Brawn.
“There’s been so much internal friction at McLaren and we all know if things aren’t right at home it saps you. It’s been like that for a few years now. It’s going to take a least another year.”
McLaren’s newly appointed Executive Director, Zak Brown, is trying to keep a lid on the two companies simmering relationship.
He added: “All our conversations with Honda have been ‘how do we get out of this situation?’, so the relationship is very healthy.
“We’re in daily contact with them so we’re heads down, we’ve got a long term contract.
“They are extremely motivated to help get us to where we need to get to and that’s been the focus of all our conversations.
“It is not difficult to keep everyone motivated. I’ve been very happy to see how the team has reacted.
“When you get into some difficult situations in business, sometimes that can create issues amongst workforce.
“But everything I’ve seen at McLaren is ‘how are we going to address this?’, powering through it, working together.
“Fernando is obviously frustrated that we are not more competitive, which is understandable and we share in that pain but we are not going to quit.
“We’re very open with Honda on this. We’re working with them on what’s the best way to be competitive as quickly as possible.”