McLaren feared 'total collapse' amid Honda turmoil

©McLaren

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McLaren sporting director Eric Boullier has revealed that he had genuine fears the team could have totally fallen apart last year as a result of its deteriorating relationship with engine providers Honda.

"My main worry at this time is not to have the team collapsing," he revealed. "I know the domino effect as well, you know.

"It takes years to build an F1 team but you can kill it in six months."

Boullier makes his comments in a new four-part behind-the-scenes documentary "Grand Prix Driver" made by Amazon.

It will be available for online streaming from February 9, but has been screened in advance for Autosport magazine.

Boullier explained that matters came to a head when the team's new car for 2017 performed much worse than expected in pre-season testing. It left McLaren's star driver fuming at the situation

"After this testing, Fernando is quite pissed off," Boullier says in the film.

"He is clearly saying I may reconsider my position to race because I'm not going to survive another year like this."

New Amazon series chronicles McLaren's road to perdition with Honda

"He will not stay. I am a 100 per cent certain he will not stay..."

Boullier said he felt that if Alonso had walked out before the start of the season, the team wouldn't survive.

"In this business you know how it works," he say. "When you are weak, people they come, they just poach who they want."

The team's chief operating officer Jonathan Neale is shown briefing the team's engineers about the disappointing test in which he admits that Honda's performance had been a "shock" to the McLaren contingent.

"A line has been crossed," Neale tells them. "We are done. We've done that experiment about just trusting what is going to happen."

The documentary's producer Manish Pandey commended the team for allowing the filmmakers to get such a raw view of a team in crisis.

"It's no secret that this has been the most difficult season in McLaren's history," he said. "It would have been easy for them to close the doors on us."

He added that McLaren trusted fans "to recognise that all competitors take falls - but only great champions get up again, fight and win."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.