Dennis should pay the price for McLaren wreckage

Ron Dennis

It is hard to find the right words to describe the season that McLaren Mercedes and Ron Dennis, their embattled team principal, have endured this year. A shambles, a disaster – take your pick.

The proud Woking-based Formula One team have stumbled from one crisis to another, culminating this week in having to issue a humiliating public apology to their rivals, fans and the FIA, the sport’s governing body, in an attempt to stave off further sanctions for conduct that amounts to cheating.

It had all looked so bright and beautiful in the McLaren garden this time last year. Lewis Hamilton was about to make his debut, the team had secured the services of Fernando Alonso, the double world champion, and a glorious season in Dennis’s 60th year seemed on the cards. Who knows, he could even have been on his way to Buckingham Palace for a knighthood by the end of this month, but not any more.

Instead, we are left to ponder how on earth it all went wrong and why Dennis and possibly also Martin Whitmarsh, his right-hand man and chief operating officer, have not already resigned or been fired. If their chosen field had been politics or football, for example, both would have been forced out months ago.

Consider the charge-sheet. Quite apart from McLaren not winning a drivers’ World Championship since Mika Hakkinen’s in 1999 and a constructors’ title since a year before that (in football this would have been enough on its own to have sent Dennis and Whitmarsh packing), this season has seen a truly extraordinary catalogue of failings under their “watch".

Ron Dennis and Fernando Alonso

They completely failed to meet the challenge of managing Alonso, who ripped the team apart as his own frailties in the face of Hamilton’s quality on the track led him from disillusionment to destructive anger. In trying to handle the Spaniard, Dennis stumbled from one row to another, each with more damaging consequences, until the two refrained from speaking to each other at all. More at the England Times