Have you ever had a dream? Honda says it has, and it comes unsullied by sponsors' logos.

Although I have been a Formula One follower for most of my life, and a straightforward car fanatic before that, my support has come with a cloak of cynicism, dating pretty much from the sight of Michael Schumacher winning the 1998 British Grand Prix whilst serving a 10-second penalty in the pits. I now filter everything that I see in Grand Prix racing through the same jaundiced lens which doubts the motives of politicians.

The new car looks stunning. Of far more immediate concern to Honda F1 Racing will be its performance on the track, which has not matched expectations thus far. Rubens Barrichello is a known quantity, and he will be as fast as his machinery allows. The worry for Jenson Button must be that he is also a known quantity. Ever since his season in British Formula Three (when he was beaten by Marc Hynes and Luciano Burti), people have been waiting for him to make a mythical leap from having the potential to do well, to being the kind of driver who leads a team. His body language, and the way he speaks to the media, seems to be guided by how well his car is performing.

By contrast, Fernando Alonso learned racecraft by rising through the formulae, and having parallel F1 testing roles, with Minardi and Renault, learning how to set a car up to its optimum. His victory in the wet at Spa in the 2000 Formula 3000 race was a triumph not only of natural ability, but also of the technical know-how he would later demonstrate in Formula One. By fast-tracking past F3000, and not learning F1 either in a season-long testing role or a seat with a smaller team, Button has missed out on a technical education. Maybe this is something which he is only now realising, when what Honda seem to need is more of a clear direction with its car's development.

Of course, internal politics at Honda have not helped the team's fortunes either. By reshuffling the design team so fundamentally last year, Honda in Japan may have wanted to draw a line under the F1 team's previous guise as British American Racing. But the changes also brought a recognition that the team would be under closer corporate control from the parent manufacturer. No corporate-controlled manufacturer team has ever become a World Champion constructor. Before you start writing in, Ferrari do not count, as Enzo Ferrari was a racer, and built road cars at least partly to fund his racing habit. The Schumacher-Byrne-Brawn era was also all about what happened on the track, not profit margins elsewhere. Renault has won titles as a manufacturer, but the team structure is still as-you-were from the Benetton era; the people at the very top of Renault seem to recognise that Flavio Briatore knows best when it comes to managing a racing team. Sometimes a gathering of successful people do not make a successful team, as Red Bull may show this year. The culture has to be right for everyone to thrive.

When predicting the fortunes of teams and drivers, it always pays to apply a series of rules. Number one is that the bigger an event the launch is, the slower the car will be (perhaps again due to the level of corporate influence?). Given the quiet launches they have always favoured, I was even concerned to hear Williams employed a video presentation this year. I just hope their car is good enough.

Of course, McLaren might have killed this theory stone dead when the Spice Girls turned up to their launch of a car, 1997's MP4/12, which actually wasn't bad, and gave Mika Hakkinen (thanks to David Coulthard) his first Grand Prix victory in Jerez. But it was the following year's MP4/13 that was the iconic silver McLaren, with Hakkinen beating Michael Schumacher in a car so blissfully smooth to drive on the limit that it scarcely mattered that Ferrari successfully lobbied for its braking system to be banned.