McLaren-Honda Can Score 1st Points of 2015 F1 Season at Chinese Grand Prix

McLaren simply couldn't continue like that.

Across the opening two race weekends of the 2015 Formula One season, the targets were set embarrassingly low for a team which remains one of the most iconic names in world motorsport.

Content to tag along at the rear of the field, circulating with no aspiration or purpose, McLaren were a shadow of their former selves.

Their drivers, Jenson Button and Fernando Alonso, two men who are accustomed to fighting for podium finishes, grand prix victories and world championships, have been forced to play along with the charade.

The former's 11th-place finish in Australia, where he finished two laps behind the winner, was regarded as "a small victory for the team" by reserve driver Kevin Magnussen, according to McLaren's official website.

Both Alonso and Button toed the party line in Malaysia, informing the team's official website how it was "a nice surprise" to be able to see the rarest of beasts—cars of other teams—a quarter into the race.

Meanwhile, racing director Eric Boullier told the same source how a "significant improvement" had been made between the Australia and Malaysia weekends, despite his drivers being forced to retire well in advance of the chequered flag at Sepang.

And Alonso took it a step further ahead of this weekend's Chinese Grand Prix, telling Autosport's Ben Anderson how he feels "more happy and more proud of my job and my team doing the things we are doing now than winning a trophy."

Floundering at the back of the grid is bad enough. But pretending to take more pleasure, satisfaction and fulfillment from helping McLaren return to their feet than standing on a grand prix podium, spraying that champagne onto a herd of joyous colleagues, was borderline insulting and against the principles of motor-racing and, indeed, sport.

McLaren, a team who not too long ago did everything they possibly could to win, had suddenly decided it really was the taking part that counts.

At the root of McLaren's lack of competitiveness, and low expectations, was their new Honda power unit, which, as a result of its limited exposure in pre-season testing, was detuned across the Australian and Malaysian weekends to safeguard reliability and ensure both team and engine supplier acquired a greater understanding of the new technology.

And after the extremely tentative steps of the first two races, there seemed to be cause for genuine encouragement on Friday at the Shanghai International Circuit, to the point where the team will no longer be forced to search for positives that do not exist.

Across the opening two free practice sessions, Alonso and Button completed a combined total of 95 laps, with the latter's best time of FP2, one minute, 39.275 seconds, good enough for 10th place on the time sheets.

As per the official F1 website, Button's lap was just 0.1 seconds slower than the best time of Romain Grosjean, driving the Mercedes-powered Lotus, and 0.2 seconds adrift of the Ferrari-powered Sauber of Felipe Nasr.

Although it is notoriously difficult to examine the times of free practice sessions, the fact that Button managed to get so close to cars with the finest engines on the current grid is promising ahead of a weekend which both Boullier and Alonso had previously told Motorsport.com's Pablo Elizalde would be troublesome for the team.

In a sense, however, the Chinese Grand Prix and next week's Bahrain GP have come at the perfect time for McLaren.

With the Shanghai track featuring the longest straight on the calendar—the back stretch is 1,175 metres long, according to BBC Sport—and the Sakhir International Circuit having no fewer than four long straights, the team's lack of straight-line speed risked being brutally exposed over the next two race weekends.

At Sepang, after all, only Manor Marussia's Roberto Merhi, with the 2014-spec Ferrari engine, was slower than the McLarens in the speed trap, according to the FIA's data. The same was true when it came to the maximum speeds in the first and third sectors, which are mostly reliant on engine performance, as per the FIA information.

With a three-week gap between the Bahrain race and the following round in Spain—by which point McLaren, as Boullier told Crash.net, hope to be truly on the pace—the races in China and Bahrain offer the team an opportunity to throw caution to the wind and prioritise performance over reliability for the first time in 2015.

Rather than maintaining their current position, hoping to crawl to the finish on reduced power, the team, with the knowledge that substantial upgrades are imminent, would be well-advised to be more adventurous, turn the Honda engine up to its highest setting yet and, well, go for it.

Disregarding any future engine-usage penalties in favour of salvaging something—not just anything, as has been the case—from the opening phase of the season is the right way to go, and the team could reap the rewards of being a little more daring.

A points finish could be on offer for McLaren in the Chinese Grand Prix. It may just be a question of whether the team will be willing to pursue it.

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