Amazon Prime has returned to things four-wheeled with its latest original production. It's not another Jeremy Clarkson spinoff, though; it's a rare look at the inner workings of a Formula 1 team. Grand Prix Driver is a four-part documentary—available from today—that gives the viewer an access-all-pass into the workings off the McLaren team as it gets ready for the 2017 Formula 1 season.

Access to teams in this highly competitive and highly secretive sport is unusual, particularly a team as image-conscious as McLaren. So it's a little surprising just how much we get to see, as what's meant to be a turnaround season instead plumbs new depths of despair for the organization.

It's a simple concept: camera crews wander about the breathtaking McLaren Technology Center, the white-and-gray technopalace from which the cars are birthed. They film in meeting rooms, workshop bays, and at the test track, as the 2017 car comes together and the team's two drivers—superstar Fernando Alonso and rookie Stoffel Vandoorne—in the run-up to the first race of the year. But the cameras are visiting MTC at an eventful time.

Ron Dennis has run the team since 1981, during which time it redefined professionalism in the paddock. A technocrat with a truly obsessive attention to detail, Dennis oversaw the vast majority of its World Drivers' Championships (10 out of 12) and World Constructors' Championships (seven out of eight).

But McLaren hasn't had that kind of form of late, and its last win was in 2012. As the documentary opens, Dennis has just been pushed out by the team's other shareholders and replaced by Zak Brown, whose job it is to get new sponsors—and therefore more budget—to get back on top.

If it were just the chaos of a new boss coming in, we might have ended up with an automotive version of The Office. But for McLaren, it gets worse.

The team is in the third year of a partnership with Honda, which makes the fiercely complicated engines and hybrid systems now required by the rules. During the 1980s, McLaren-Honda was feared by all, coming closer to a perfect season in 1988 than anyone before or since. The sport is very different now; the powertrains are orders of magnitude more complicated, and testing—which was once unlimited—is now highly restricted both before and during the season.

Honda's engines have—to put it bluntly—sucked. When it joined up with McLaren in 2015, Mercedes, Ferrari, and Renault already had a year running the new hybrids under their collective belt. Over the next two years, Honda has tried to catch up, battling poor reliability and a power deficit. Things were starting to look up at the end of 2016, but any hope of continuing that momentum into the new season evaporated like a puddle of racing gas on a hot summer's day. The new engine doesn't fit the new car, and when it is possible to get a car up and running at the Barcelona preseason test, it keeps breaking down. By September, so too had the relationship with Honda.

That's not to suggest McLaren shares no blame; its job was to build the car on time for the first shakedown, a date it missed as parts weren't ready yet. And watching Grand Prix Driver, you get a sense that sometimes people on the team don't realize quite how bad things are; it was hard to keep a straight face when we saw the new livery unveiled, a color scheme which ought to have used McLaren's vivid Papaya Orange paint but instead managed to appear a bad copy of the failed Manor F1 team's design. To make matters worse, Ferrari decided—late in the game—to launch its own 2017 car on the same day as McLaren.

As the new kid, we get a lot more access to Vandoorne than double world champ Alonso. That's probably to be expected—racing director Eric Boullier openly worries that Alonso will take one look at the new car's poor performance and use it as an excuse to leave the team. So keeping cameras out of Alonso's way was surely a priority. But even if his appearances are brief, Grand Prix Driver is worth a watch. Vandoorne is engaging, and definitely a star of the future. And even if McLaren went on to have a dismal 2017, the documentary provides a vivid snapshot of this expensive and rarefied corner of the motorsports world. I mean, could you imagine Ron letting this happen?