Another instalment in the world’s most expensive soap opera known as Formula One aired this weekend with the elevation of Ron Dennis to the status of Knight Bachelor.
Arise, Sir Ron! – and so the long-held ambition of the former McLaren owner’s mid-late life is justly honoured at the age of 76.
Nobody in the sport doubts that Dennis is one of its towering figures. Bernie Ecclestone and Enzo Ferrari may stand apart over the broad sweep, but Dennis’s perfectionism bordering on mania raised the standard for all modern Formula One, not just for his home-town, Woking-based company that he turned into the country’s most successful team, and the world’s second most after Ferrari.
No team principal has won more. Between taking over McLaren in 1980 and retiring in 2017, he amassed 17 world championships and 158 grand prix wins through giants such as Niki Lauda, Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost and Mika Hakkinen. Not to forget the kid he took off the streets of Stevenage and pointed towards the stars: Lewis Hamilton.
That his prodigy beat him to a knighthood by three years is not something Ron could ever have 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 plucked Hamilton off the streets of Stevenage and helped him reach the sport’s summit
It may not have been that way around other than for ramifications of the most visceral blockbuster episode of the F1 soap aired this century, namely the 2007 Spygate scandal.
This murky tale involved 780 pages of Ferrari’s technical secrets being imported into the McLaren factory during Hamilton’s debut season.
It resulted in McLaren receiving a record $100million fine that nearly wiped them off the map. They are finally showing signs of recovery.
But more than merely damaging McLaren, the sanction, and the implication of cheating that underpinned it, was intended to destroy Dennis’s reputation and to 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 loathed Dennis, and pretty much vice versa.
They were cut from very different cloths, though equally remarkable in their own way. Mosley was the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the fascist Blackshirts, whose rebarbative politics his son never disavowed. He was a minor aristocrat, Oxford-educated and fluent in several languages.
Dennis, one of the great self-made men, started out as an 18-year-old mechanic on Jochen Rindt’s Cooper. In contrast to Mosley’s lawyerly eloquence, Dennis’s idiosyncratic use of English was so complex and verbose it earned its own moniker in the paddock, ‘Ronspeak’.
Examples of his convolutions are numerous. They all make sense, but bend round labyrinths to get there. ‘When I came into motor racing so many things were a black art,’ he said. ‘But black art was a cloak for, ‘We don’t really know’. It was intuitive engineering. I decided to make it a science. We will develop science to take away uncertainty to make winning a certainty.’
Dennis shows the future King Charles around McLaren trophy room in their factory in 1999
Or: ‘Focus is thought to be good, obsession is thought to be bad. But basically they’re the same thing. And then there’s ego. Ego is a core ingredient of ambition.
‘Ambition and ego are close bedfellows. And, like everybody, I suppose, I seek happiness. It’s an uncomplicated objective. I don’t see happiness as laughing or clapping your hands. I see it as the opposite of unhappiness, the opposite of anger, of depression. If you can get into that state of mind, you’re going to be far more productive.’
But back to the Mosley-Dennis animus. Dennis was wont to be awkward at F1 meetings, a thorn in the sides of Ecclestone and his sidekick Max. Informed, self-confident, Ron was willing to question decisions in a way other team principals didn’t dare. He wouldn’t settle for a 30 per cent uplift if he thought it should be 40 per cent.
Nor, during the Spygate imbroglio, did Mosley feel Dennis was as upfront about how far Ferrari’s intellectual property had permeated through the team as he ought to have been. This prompted the immortal quote, uttered by Ecclestone: ‘It’s $5m for the crime; $95m for Ron being a c***.’
In another barely credible twist, Mosley was revealed in the News of the World the following year as having paid for role-play orgies of a particularly colourful hue in a west London basement. Speaking one day in his first floor lair in McLaren’s HQ — the futuristic Sir Norman Foster-designed building sometimes known as SMERSH — Dennis told me he was convinced Mosley had it in for him, saying: ‘Do you think that Max is only a sado-masochist in his private life? It’s not possible.’
In the last 48 hours, one of F1’s most senior figures, upon hearing of Dennis’s knighthood, chuckled that Max would be climbing out of his grave. Dennis’s nemesis, who spent the last few years of his life on a crazed bid to muzzle the free press in direct response to the News of the World expose, died at home in London in May 2021, aged 81.
Ailing from incurable cancer, Max Rufus Mosley blew his brains out, leaving 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 services to charity, but so was Sir Ian Botham’s. Both Dennis and Botham have done marvellous deeds for good causes but, just as we will always remember Botham for his exploits as a cricketer of genius, history will recognise Dennis chiefly for his achievements in F1.
The former F1 chief seen on the dodgems with the Duchess of York at a charity ball in 1994
One of Britain’s great entrepreneurs, he travelled a long journey from a boyhood hanging around the Brabham factory making tea to a personal fortune of some £750m.
He transformed a dilapidated factory on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Woking into a byword for British ingenuity. McLaren have produced technologies for airports and hospitals and winning cyclists and, indeed, the bobsleigh on which Lizzy Yarnold raced head-first to gold at the Sochi Winter Olympics a decade ago.
There were 100 McLaren employees when Dennis arrived in 1980. When he left, McLaren Group’s staff stood at 3,500 with a turnover of £920m and a road car business close to reaching its production target of 5,500.
Stories about Ron are legend. Can it really be true that he had the gravel in his driveway taken away to be washed and returned? Or that he once interviewed someone through his kitchen window so that the interviewee’s shoes didn’t soil his pristine carpets?
Demanding, neurotic, in turns charming and aloof, always striving for self-improvement, Ron is a man of generosity and loyalty. His kindnesses are prodigious, both in minute, personal ways to friends who fall into ill-health, and on the larger stage. He is chairman and founder of Podium Analytics, which works with sports stars to help reduce injury.
He also founded Tommy’s, a pregnancy charity that seeks to reduce complications and death and to support those who experience bereavement.
This involvement is motivated by his own bitter experience when he and his vivacious ex-wife Lisa lost a child of their own. They have three other children from the marriage that ended in 2008.
Although McLaren have appropriately paid tribute over the weekend to Brazilian Gil de Ferran, their highly regarded consultant and winner of the Indianapolis 500 who died aged 56 of a heart attack on Friday while racing in America, there has been no word on their social media sites to mark Dennis’s distinction.
It’s a baffling omission by the new guard. For Sir Ron Dennis is one of the two supreme figures in McLaren history, alongside only founder Bruce McLaren himself.
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