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Another installment of the world’s most expensive soap opera known as Formula One aired this weekend with the elevation of Ron Dennis to Knight Bachelor status.
Get up, Mr. Ron! – and so the former McLaren owner’s long-standing midlife ambition is rightly honored at the age of 76.
No one in the sport doubts that Dennis is one of its outstanding figures. Bernie Ecclestone and Enzo Ferrari may be broadly distinguishable, but Dennis’s perfectionism, bordering on mania, raised the bar for all of modern Formula One, not just his hometown, the Woking-based company that turned on the most successful team in the country. and the second largest in the world after Ferrari.
No team manager has won more. Between taking charge of McLaren in 1980 and retiring in 2017, he amassed 17 world championships and 158 grand prix victories through giants such as Niki Lauda, Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost and Mika Hakkinen. Not forgetting the boy he took from the streets of Stevenage and aimed for the stars: Lewis Hamilton.
That his prodigy earned him a knighthood for three years is not something Ron could have ever contemplated when he was playing Professor Higgins to Hamilton’s Eliza Doolittle.
Ron Dennis, right, celebrates after Lewis Hamilton’s victory at the Monaco Grand Prix in 2013.
Dennis took Hamilton off the streets of Stevenage and helped him reach the top of the sport.
That may not have been the case, save for the ramifications of the most visceral episode of F1 soap opera staged this century, namely the Spygate scandal of 2007.
This murky story involved 780 pages of Ferrari technical secrets imported into the McLaren factory during Hamilton’s debut season.
This resulted in McLaren receiving a record $100 million fine that nearly wiped them off the map. They are finally showing signs of recovery.
But more than simply damaging McLaren, the sanction and the implication of cheating behind it were intended to destroy Dennis’ reputation and deny him the knighthood he craved.
That was the clear intention of Max Mosley, the president of the FIA, whose body imposed the fine. Mosley hated Dennis and practically the other way around.
They were made of very different materials, although equally remarkable in their own way. Mosley was the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the fascist Blackshirts, whose repressive policies his son never repudiated. He was a minor aristocrat, educated at Oxford and fluent in several languages.
One of the great self-made men, Dennis started at the age of 18 as a mechanic at Jochen Rindt’s Cooper. In contrast to Mosley’s legal eloquence, Dennis’s idiosyncratic use of English was so complex and verbose that he earned his own paddock nickname, ‘Ronspeak’.
The examples of his convolutions are numerous. They all make sense, but you have to navigate mazes to get there. “When I got into motorsports, a lot of things were black art,” she said. “But black art was a disguise to say, ‘We really don’t know.’” It was intuitive engineering. I decided to make it a science. We will develop science to eliminate uncertainty and make winning a certainty.’
Dennis shows future King Charles the McLaren trophy room at his factory in 1999
Or: “Concentration is thought to be good, obsession is bad.” But basically they are the same. And then there is the ego. Ego is a central ingredient of ambition.
‘Ambition and ego are close bedfellows. And, like everyone else, I guess, I’m looking for happiness. It is a simple objective. I don’t see happiness as laughing or clapping. I see it as the opposite of unhappiness, the opposite of anger, of depression. If you can adopt that state of mind, you will be much more productive.”
But back to the animosity between Mosley and Dennis. Dennis used to be awkward at F1 meetings, a thorn in Ecclestone’s side and his teammate Max’s. Informed and self-confident, Ron was willing to question decisions in a way other team managers didn’t dare. He wouldn’t settle for a 30 percent raise if he thought it should be 40 percent.
During the Spygate imbroglio, Mosley also did not feel that Dennis was as candid about the extent to which Ferrari’s intellectual property had penetrated the team as he should have been. This prompted the immortal quote, uttered by Ecclestone: ‘It’s $5 million for the crime; 95 million dollars for Ron’s assault.
In another barely believable twist, the following year it was revealed in the News of the World that Mosley had paid for particularly colorful role-playing orgies in a west London basement. One day, speaking in his lair on the first floor of McLaren’s headquarters (the futuristic building designed by Sir Norman Foster, sometimes known as SMERSH), Dennis told me that he was convinced Mosley had something against him and said: ” “Do you think Max is just a sado?” -masochist in his private life? It’s not possible.’
In the last 48 hours, one of F1’s biggest figures, upon hearing of Dennis’s knighthood, chuckled that Max would emerge from his grave. Dennis’s enemy, who spent the last years of his life in a mad attempt to muzzle the free press in direct response to the News of the World expose, died at his London home in May 2021, at the age of 81 years old.
Suffering from incurable cancer, Max Rufus Mosley blew out his brains and left a note on the bedroom door: “Do not enter.” Call the police.’
What a triumph this gong is for Ron. Officially, it is awarded for charitable services, but so was Sir Ian Botham’s. Both Dennis and Botham have performed wonderful feats for good causes but, just as Botham will always be remembered for his exploits as a cricketer of genius, history will recognize Dennis primarily for his achievements in F1.
The former F1 boss seen in the Dodgems with the Duchess of York at a charity ball in 1994
One of Britain’s great businessmen, he took a long journey from his childhood wandering around the Brabham factory making tea to a personal fortune of around £750 million.
He transformed a derelict factory into an industrial estate on the outskirts of Woking synonymous with British ingenuity. McLaren has produced technologies for airports and hospitals and winning cyclists and, indeed, the bobsleigh in which Lizzy Yarnold raced headlong to gold at the Sochi Winter Olympics a decade ago.
There were 100 employees at McLaren when Dennis arrived in 1980. When he left, the McLaren Group’s workforce was 3,500 with a turnover of £920m and a road vehicle business close to reaching its production target of 5,500.
The stories about Ron are legends. Can it really be true that he had the gravel removed from his driveway to be washed and returned? Or that he once interviewed someone through his kitchen window so that the interviewee’s shoes wouldn’t dirty his spotless carpets?
Demanding, neurotic, both charming and distant, always striving to improve himself, Ron is a generous and loyal man. His kindness is prodigious, both in personal and minute ways towards friends suffering from health problems and on the broader stage. He is president and founder of Podium Analytics, which works with sports stars to help reduce injuries.
She also founded Tommy’s, a pregnancy charity that aims to reduce complications and death and support those experiencing grief.
This involvement is motivated by his own bitter experience when he and his vivacious ex-wife Lisa lost their own son. They have three other children from the marriage that ended in 2008.
Although McLaren appropriately paid tribute over the weekend to Brazilian Gil de Ferran, its respected consultant and Indianapolis 500 winner, who died at age 56 of a heart attack on Friday while racing in the United States, there has been no news on their social media sites. to mark Dennis’ distinction.
It’s a baffling omission on the part of the new guard. Because Sir Ron Dennis is one of the two supreme figures in McLaren’s history, along with founder Bruce McLaren himself.