McLaren racing director Eric Boullier believes the team's chassis performance is now back to the sort of level where it should be producing but is being masked by Honda.

Pre-season testing was a difficult time for McLaren as Honda struggled with reliability issues as well as a performance deficit to its rivals. Throughout the eight days of pre-season testing, McLaren's longest stint was 11 consecutive laps and it finished with the lowest mileage of all ten teams. With little in the way of consistent running, it was hard to judge the MCL32's potential, but Boullier told RACER there has been a clear improvement year-on-year.

"Yes we've improved, because when I joined McLaren, McLaren had a culture of redesigning everything in two months and turning around everything," Boullier said. "But after 2012 it didn't work anymore and one of the reasons is because since 2010 the regulations have changed and there are so many restrictions that you can't do what you want as before.

 "The way to be successful since those days is to build up a car concept that you can carry over for many years. So in 2015 we had Honda – which obviously was its first year in Formula 1 – but we also completely changed the car concept and started from scratch. This is why we were also lacking in performance but that was the right time to do it, with the non-maturity of Honda.

"Since then we have developed the same concept, the same platform and I think today it is really starting to pay off because the chassis looks good and the chassis performance looks OK. Obviously it is still hidden behind the PU performance because today the PU is a big performance differentiator."

Asked if it is fair to say McLaren has improved more quickly than Honda has since 2015, Boullier replied: "Well, we just went back to the ballpark where McLaren should be."

Honda recently stated its confidence that it will have reliability fixes in place for the Australian Grand Prix, with potential power upgrades to be introduced after a few races.