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On the bare face of it, if you were Mercedes, Ferrari or Red Bull you won't look back on any of the first eight races of this Formula 1 season and be overly concerned about the second coming of McLaren-Honda.

Even the significantly less well-funded squads of Williams and Force India, which have put a car on the podium in each of the past three grands prix, will not likely be glancing at the F1 constructors' championship table and quaking in their collective boots.

McLaren-Honda has been back together for 27 races. During that time it has scored precisely no wins, no podiums, and just 51 points. Fifty-one points is eight fewer than Force India has collected during the first eight races of 2016 alone.

Looking at the results of the last two races in particular, McLaren's rivals will have no cause for concern. Jenson Button finished nearly 20 seconds adrift of the top 10 in the European Grand Prix in Azerbaijan, and nearly 1m45s behind race winner Nico Rosberg; team-mate Fernando Alonso finished more than 27s off the top 10 in Canada, and was lapped by race winner Lewis Hamilton.

So far, so what? The key here is McLaren's rate of progress. Last season Alonso felt the car's lack of pace around Montreal made him look like an amateur. Trouble with the engine meant team-mate Button failed to participate in qualifying, while Alonso was only 15th fastest.

Without irregular mechanical problems for Sebastian Vettel's Ferrari and Felipe Massa's Williams, Alonso would have been slower than all but the outdated Manors for the 2015 race. He then just about scraped ahead of a Sauber in Q2, before railing against Honda's lack of top-end power during the race.

This season Alonso made the top 10 in qualifying, a feat he's managed in three out of the last four races. Last season, McLaren never made Q3 once all year.

Perhaps the best indicator of how far any team has come compared to 2015 is Russia. F1 has made two visits to Sochi in the space of little more than six months, using the same range of tyre compounds on both trips.

Lap time gain in Sochi, 2015-16
1. Manor, 4.294s
2. McLaren, 2.092s
3. Red Bull, 1.880s
4. Ferrari, 1.842s
5. Mercedes, 1.696s
6. Force India, 1.447s
7. Toro Rosso, 1.414s
8. Williams, 0.896s
9. Sauber, 0.305s
10. Renault, -0.160s

If you compare the fastest lap times set by each car across both race weekends, only Manor has made a bigger jump from 2015 to '16 than McLaren. But that's hardly surprising. Manor used outdated equipment last year, so had more to gain than any other team by fitting a current Mercedes engine to a new chassis.

Calculating the gain McLaren made relative to each of its rivals between Sochi 2015 and '16 suggests it's gained over a second on Williams, more than six tenths on Toro Rosso, just under six tenths on Force India, nearly half a second on Ferrari, more than three tenths on Mercedes, and a tad over one-and-a-half tenths on Red Bull.

Of course this data is skewed by track evolution between the different segments of qualifying, and whether particular teams and drivers hooked decent laps together, but it gives us an indication.

"The six-month gap was perfect for us to compare our car performance and it was actually pretty impressive," McLaren-Honda racing director Eric Boullier tells Autosport.

"We are clearly moving ahead, and the engine is starting to improve as well.

"We are in the ballpark of everybody now regarding the MGU-H, which was our weakness last year, and now we just need more power - more straightline speed. That's going to come. And when it comes it's going to be a massive gain for us."

McLaren's power limitation means it has focused on adding downforce to its car while reducing drag as far as possible. The MP4-31 has been conceived around this. Efficiency is the name of the game for any aerodynamicist, of course, but you have a bit more room for manoeuvre with drag if the engine can help you out.

"Because of this straightline speed story we can't develop what we call the 'dirty downforce', so we have to have a very aerodynamically efficient car," Boullier explains.

"When we have more power this will be easy to use and exploit.

"Mercedes develop their car around the fact that they have a very powerful engine. It's more difficult to do what we do. The day we can their way we are going to catch up straight away."

It is clear Honda has made big strides with reliability too. McLaren-Honda's rate of power unit component consumption is still greater than any other team on the grid, but the engines are no longer failing with 2015's alarming regularity.

Total power unit component usage in 2016, after eight races
1. McLaren-Honda 38
2. Ferrari 31
3. Mercedes 30
4. Sauber-Ferrari 28
5. Red Bull-Renault 27
6= Haas-Ferrari & Renault 25
8= Williams-Mercedes & Force India-Mercedes 24
11. Manor-Mercedes 22

Honda says it has achieved its target for ERS performance this season, doubling the amount of energy it can recover from the hybrid systems thanks to winter developments and a turbo update introduced in Canada.

This means McLaren-Honda is less exposed to running short of electrical energy on longer circuits with bigger straights, and can now avoid running consistently light on top-end power during races, as was so often the case last year.

"From a technical point of view the turbine update looks very good," confirms Honda's F1 chief Yusuke Hasegawa. "Our recovery system's performance is not very different to the top teams, I am very confident about that.

"I can't tell if it is better than the others, but it's reasonable to say it's a very even area.

"From an energy recovery system point of view we have already achieved our target, which is already on Mercedes level."

The focus now is on finding more pure power from the combustion engine, which is a big challenge without compromising those gains made with the ERS.

"With this power unit if you improve the recovery you lose power, so you need to work on both," explains Boullier. "If you increase the pressure at the exhaust to have more energy recovery, you need to also work on improving the ICE.

"It's like balancing scales. This is what Renault was struggling with before - they were increasing the recovery but they could never increase the power .

"If you improve the power then you lose the recovery. You need both, and this is why you need your fuel and lubricant partner to work with you.

"Improving the ICE, or even the exhaust-gas pressure, you need to have more efficiency in the fuel."

Hasegawa says the Honda combustion engine has also improved since 2015, but the gains are essentially masked by that extra ERS performance. He feels the current engine is no less powerful than last year's, which overall equals a step forward.

The drivers can now challenge for Q3 regularly, especially on circuits where the power effect is less, but they tend to get left behind after showing strong Friday pace as others turn their engines up for qualifying. This is where Honda's pure power deficit is really exposed.

Honda has yet to introduce an in-season ICE development in 2016, whereas its rivals have all done so. Hasegawa says Honda "definitely will" update the ICE before the end of this season, but developments from its Sakura HQ are so far not forthcoming.

"It is very simple, we don't have enough performance in an update so we can't introduce it," explains Hasegawa. "We are not ready. We don't have any ideal parts for that.

"In some of the individual experimental tests we see some benefits, but we can't prove it as a complete engine.

"We don't have enough time to change everything - we don't have enough tokens."

This suggests Honda has a plan to find the power it needs, but cannot reliably execute it within the framework of the current regulations, which limit in-season development through a system of tokens.

After introducing its turbo update in Canada, Honda has just 12 remaining for the rest of 2016. That compares to four for Ferrari, 11 for Mercedes and 21 for Renault.

Honda says it will introduce some "additive parts" to improve the current engine, but clearly it feels 12 tokens are insufficient to take the big leap forward it really needs to make.

One insider who knows the F1 engine development game intimately says the token system offers ample opportunity to develop; that the only reason you wouldn't is because you don't know how to find more performance, or can't do it without introducing unreliability.

Renault spent just three on the ICE update it brought to May's Monaco GP, which it estimates to be worth roughly 0.5s on a conventional circuit, perhaps more once it learns the nuances of how the new engine performs on track.

This begs the question, what is Honda playing at? Has it found some structural limitation with its 2016 engine that prevents it from finding worthwhile incremental steps in performance? Or has it simply decided it needs to focus on the bigger picture of 2017, when the technical regulations will change substantially and the token system will be abolished?

Whether Honda has the wherewithal to find a big leap in combustive performance for next season is the big doubt looming over the McLaren-Honda project. It is still undoubtedly fourth best in the power stakes, behind Mercedes, Ferrari and Renault, and arguably on a par with the late 2015-spec Ferrari that currently powers Toro Rosso.

But therein lies a warning shot for Honda's rivals. It's easy to forget how much later the Japanese manufacturer joined F1's V6 hybrid turbo game. Honda is one year behind the rest in terms of racing experience, and more when you factor in preliminary R&D and dyno work.

To have a power unit after 27 races that can roughly match what Ferrari put out after 34 (though admittedly with no in-season development through 2014) is pretty good going.

"At this moment I feel very confident with the ratio of improvement," says Hasegawa.

"It's much steeper than the other manufacturers. We have to accelerate our development much faster than them.

"The energy recovery has already doubled from last year and is achieving at the top level. It is incredible we have achieved that in two to three years, where others have taken seven to eight years."

So while it's true Honda is still nowhere near where it needs to be at present, it's rate of development is undeniable. Its rivals will be well aware of this.

Midfield teams such as Toro Rosso and Force India are already making wary statements about McLaren's current level of competitiveness, feeling that if their rival is so respectable on 'power' tracks like Montreal and Baku in 2016, it will only become stronger.

"They should not be nervous because soon we will be smoke for them!" quips Boullier.

"The machine is working. And it's not the midfield teams, which to be honest I don't care much , it's more the big teams now that start to be nervous.

"We will keep a low profile, because we don't want to over-promise, but the machine is starting to build up."

Next year represents a big chance for McLaren too. With the regulations shifting the performance balance back towards aerodynamics again, it will be the true test of the engineering revamp undertaken since Boullier joined the team in late-2013.

The team is functioning well; it has two world champion drivers (plus the hottest young property in single-seaters outside F1 in Stoffel Vandoorne) on its books; and it has the resources to carry the fight to Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull.

But of course so much still depends on Honda, and whether it can transpose the steep development curve of its ERS to that 2017 internal combustion engine.

If it can, it shouldn't be long before McLaren-Honda is truly frightening the big teams once again. If not, another 12 months of midfield mediocrity doesn't bear thinking about.