Since Jenson Button won at Interlagos, at the end of the championship 2012, the McLaren team will not return to the top of the podium, which in numbers translates into 54 major awards, the longest winning streak that has suffered from the team of Woking since its foundation. The previous record was 53 races, from which James Hunt won the japanese Grand Prix of 1977 until the victory of John Watson in Great Britain in 1981. So that in the McLaren are rewriting their own history and what is most worrying of the matter is that the periods of drought before that had a reason for being very different to the one that now plagues the land of Ron Dennis and his men.
And it is that victory of Hunt represented the agony of a cycle in the McLaren, the end of the redesigns for the single-seater, the M23, which was not giving more, and the sterile attempts by Gordon Coppuck to be competitive, from a car like the M26 that was born looking into the past. In 1980, in the month of September, assumed control of the team Ron Dennis and hires John Barnard to be in charge of the technical area. The MP4/1, the first Formula 1 with carbon fibre chassis, started in 1981 a new cycle winner. So that the transition from the old M23 towards the visionary MP4/1 justifies the absence of victories.
The second negative cycle of McLaren’s happened since the victory of Ayrton Senna in Adelaide 1993 until David Coulthard won in Melbourne in 1997, there they had to wait for 49 runs. The output of the brazilian star, via Williams, the change of the technical rules and the partnership with Peugeot they were the cause of restructuring, but in the same way, as well as in the previous case, once that stabilized all of the elements, the arrival of Mercedes-Benz in 1995 and the consolidation of Mika Hakkinen as a pilot of the highest level, the losing streak ended and began a new period of victories.
But now the circumstances are different, have a couple of former champions in their ranks and with the support of Honda, however, is almost zero progress seen this season, if we are talking about a team like McLaren. As I said in another article, the most worrying of the matter is that the bad run started not with Honda but with Mercedes Benz, the champions of the world in terms of engines. Of there that point to the japanese as the only people responsible for the MP4/30 will not be competitive is absurd.
Ron Dennis knew how to put an end to the long periods without wins experienced by the team above because that has been good as a protagonist at all, but are 54 races without a win and not noticed improvements beyond those illusions, circumstances a career as that of Austin, which proved beneficial to the morale of the team, in the case of the sixth place of Jenson Button, but in any case the numbers granted approach to a victory, all be normal, in the races that are missing or in the next season.