It was always going to be a risk, Honda were going to get there sooner or later, to me it still makes me wonder if McLaren were slightly arrogant when they signed up Honda as they didn’t want any customer teams. Granted Honda probably slightly oversold themselves back in 2014 but when they realised things weren’t going too smoothly they should have given heavily discounted engines to whoever wanted to run them (obviously there’s a chance no one wanted to run them of course) to get more data and get an understanding of the issues they were facing. This year McLaren still seem slightly lost, albeit in a much better car this year from the looks of it thats in an incredibly tight midfield which is just a well as they don’t have Alonso to rag it up the order.
Ferrari is an odd one, while testing is just testing they still looked like they’d be at least up there on pace with Mercedes (who always sandbag and play their chances down before the season gets going), I’ve seen one report (maybe from AMuS?) that they ran their power unit on a very low power setting and tried to compromise by running slightly less downforce. I’ve literally only seen this being reported on one site so I have a hard time believing it really although it would in part explain why they finished 50 seconds down the road from the winner. Just really odd though and as you said if they hadn’t messed up Gasly’s qualifying the Ferrari’s would have been 5th and 6th
This is why I’m delighted with how Bottas won today, a commanding win against one of the best on the grid, although reading up on it work (quiet day) Mercedes have said Hamilton had floor damage causing the imbalance, although he didn’t really say anything about it on the radio, certainly not to the degree you’d expect if you thought the car had a problem so who knows. If 2019 is going to be a Mercedes season (again) then I'd much rather Bottas and Hamilton fight for it to liven it up like Rosberg did.
I think so far the new regulations have worked well, the cars definitely seem to be able to drive closer together with an increase in performance while they were all worried they’d lose a chunk of time. We should see some exciting races on normal tracks.