Sadness at McLaren coup

RON DENNIS AND McLAREN FORMULA 1 ARE SYNONYMOUS, ONE IS NOTHING WITHOUT THE OTHER

Ron Dennis, 69, has been deposed as CEO of The McLaren Technology Group. the position of the man at the helm of the McLaren Formula 1 race team.

Ron Dennis, CBE, (“RD” to use his more common title) and McLaren Formula 1 are synonymous, one and the same and one is nothing without the other.

“Welcome to the Piranha Club!” RD said to Eddie Jordan when he and his team became part of the Formula 1 paddock and now Ron himself seems to have been the victim of the internal McLaren Piranha pool, although by all accounts it may well be his own uncompromising management style that is the cause of that.

I will not dwell on the reasons for this boardroom coup, in fact many of those reasons are known only to those involved and have been speculated upon endlessly over the last little while, mostly by people well outside of the sport.

I am aware that some of the reasons are rooted in private and personal events dating back years.

During my time at McLaren the team welcomed the TAG Group as a sponsor and then funder of the hugely successful TAG/ Porsche Turbo engine and then finally as a part owner and shareholder of the business, and the prime mover in all of this was Mansour Ojjeh, the head of the family and the privately owned company with a worldwide span.

A billionaire certainly but Mansour and his family were, and are, some of the nicest people one could wish to meet and the bond between Dennis, his then- wife Lisa and the Ojjeh family seemed to be firm and unassailable. So it is even more unfortunate that it seems that relationship went sour and has come down to a seeming Dennis v Ojjeh boardroom battle.

To a past McLaren person, to the very many who, like me, were involved in the team from the early days and into the 2000s, I think that is appalling news.

I don’t think it is any exaggeration to say that, without