Things just never seem to get better for McLaren-Honda’s Formula One team. There’s virtually no reliability, its own drivers complain about how bad the car is, and there’s even a website to track its failures. To add to the pain, McLaren-Honda is the only F1 team that hasn’t scored a single point yet in 2017.
If you’re not familiar with F1, the basic concept you need to know here is that not every car or driver that makes it to the grid will score points during a race. Only the top-10 finishers score points, with first getting 25 and 10th getting a single point on a decreasing scale. Those points go toward the driver and team, or “constructor,” championship totals, with points in the team championship equaling the total scored between a team’s two drivers throughout the season.
That means that in five races so far this season, neither Fernando Alonso nor Stoffel Vandoorne have put a point on the board for McLaren-Honda and its busted F1 cars. Compared to McLaren-Honda’s zero, the Mercedes F1 team currently has 161 points and Ferrari has 153.
But it gets worse. It somehow gets worse.
In five events, Alonso and Vandoorne have yet to both still be around at the end of a race so far this year. In each race, at least one of the two—and sometimes both!—have recorded a DNF or didn’t start the race at all. And Alonso won’t even be on the grid for one of the most noted races of the season, the Monaco Grand Prix, since he’s missing it for the Indianapolis 500. That’s great for the Verizon IndyCar Series, but so, so bad for McLaren-Honda.
You have to wonder if it’s hard to sleep at night when your daily efforts are such a nightmare. But, you know, living in a constant nightmare is probably worth it for Alonso’s annual salary.